Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

“No man on earth is truly free, all are slaves of money or necessity. Public opinion, or fear of prosecution forces each one, against his conscience, to conform.”

- Euripides.

“If you are ever tempted to look for outside approval, realize that you have compromised your integrity. If you need a witness, be your own.”

- Epictetus

"The great corrupter of public man is the ego. Looking at the mirror distracts one's attention from the problem."

- Dean Acheson

1. Don’t be misled: a commanding majority of Americans still solidly trust the military

2. U.S. intelligence says Ukraine will fail to meet offensive’s key goal

3. Manila Adamant Not to Kowtow to Beijing

4. The Dutch defense minister says the US has approved the delivery of F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine

5. Ukraine combat drone damages building in central Moscow, Russia says

6. What is happening inside the Afghan resistance?

7. Water Cannons and Lasers: South China Sea Standoff Around World War II-Era Ship Heats Up

8. Investors Fear China’s ‘Lehman Moment’ Is Looming

9. Japan scrambles jets amid Russian and Chinese naval patrol in Pacific

10. War in Ukraine is a warning to China of the risks in attacking Taiwan

11. Get Ukraine The Airpower It Needs Before It’s Too Late

12. Former U.S. officials urge Congress to enhance Biden's China investment order

13. General Says Deterring Two 'Near Peer' Competitors Is Complex

14. Embrace the Nerd: Dungeons & Dragons and Military Intelligence

15. Don’t Recognize the Taliban Government

16. Russian, Chinese Warships in East China Sea After Sailing Near Alaska

17. China ‘contagion’ talk is last thing financial world needs

18. How America Got Mean

19. Political Warfare Comes Home

1. Don’t be misled: a commanding majority of Americans still solidly trust the military

The sky is not falling.

Please go to the link to view the very useful chart.

https://sites.duke.edu/lawfire/2023/08/16/dont-be-misled-a-commanding-majority-of-americans-still-solidly-trust-the-military/?fbclid=IwAR1KVzih1wxv5mKU_1NL6MzqMvM9bH1c0bKfGAaG3VOXOY1-RPm-OB9IADI

Don’t be misled: a commanding majority of Americans still solidly trust the military

sites.duke.edu · by Charlie Dunlap, J.D. · August 16, 2023

Some pundits, academics, and others have long been insisting that U.S. civil-military relations are in a claim which, as Rosa Brooks hasis a “a recurring feature of American politics”. They will no doubt believe they have found succor in the recently released Gallup Poll showing that the percentage of Americans who had a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the military fell to 60%, the lowest since the Clinton Administration (1997).

Stark headlines like “Poll says confidence in US military lowest in 25 years” may make for great but when followed by a stories short on context they could leave some readers with serious misunderstandings about how Americans feel about their armed forces.

Sure, it’s true that during the current presidency the decline in confidence has been striking: a full 12 points from the 72% who had a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the military in the last year of the previous administration–a nearly 17% drop in just three years. So, yes, no doubt the civil-military relations’ provocateurs will claim this as further evidence of a civil-military relations “crisis.”

Except that there really isn’t a crisis. Let’s unpack this a bit.

The military is still the most trusted governmental institution.

Though the enterprise garnering the most confidence is small business, among governmental institutions the military by far leads the way. As Politico put it:

“The military still evokes the highest public trust among the 14 other institutions included in the poll. Five institutions stand as the least trusted, with newspapers, the criminal justice system, television news, big business, and Congress all garnering confidence from less than 20 percent of Americans. Congress, in particular, registers the lowest confidence at a mere 8 percent.” (Emphasis added).

A much higher measure of confidence than what the Reagan Institute survey found

Furthermore, many civ-mil commentators and others have been relying on the Ronald Reagan Institute’s National Defense Survey of November 2022 as evidence of a civilian-military relations crisis. It said:

“Just five years ago, 70% said they had a great deal of trust and confidence in the military. However, that percentage steadily declined, and last year, for the first time, a minority of Americans had the highest level of confidence in the military, only 45%. This year, that trend appears to be stabilizing. Now 48% say they have a great deal of trust and confidence in the military. Notably, this is still down 22 points from merely a few years ago.”

According to the Reagan Institute, in reply to one of a series of questions, 60% of the respondents said the leadership of the defense establishment was “overly politicized” and this decreased their confidence in the military itself. It added:

“Americans make only a slight distinction between different types of leadership when they complain about politicization. While they see civilian DOD leaders and uniformed military leaders as contributing to this issue, they are more likely to blame presidents as Commanders-in-Chief. Nearly 60% of respondents say that performance and competence of presidents has decreased their confidence in the military.” (Emphasis added).

If there is a civil-military relations concern, it is evidently mainly an issue with the “civil” side of the equation, specifically, the President. It is not with the rank and file of the armed forces; I’m convinced that the public’s affection towards them is virtually unchanged and remains very high.

In any event, though I am skeptical of the Reagan Institute poll, aligning its 48% figure from last November with Gallup’s 60% from June would suggest a 25% increase in confidence in just about six months.

The figures are best understood in the larger context

What many civil-military relations critics often omit is the larger context of the steady overall decline of Americans’ faith in all institutions. When you compare the military’s 60% to the current average low of 26% for all institutions that Gallup tracks, the military looks pretty good. Gallup observes:

“Confidence [in those institutions tracked] has generally trended downward since registering 48% in 1979 and holding near 45% in the 1980s. It averaged closer to 40% in the 1990s and early 2000s before dropping to the low 30% range in the 2010s. Last year was the first time it fell below 30%.”

Looking at Gallup’s chart is extremely helpful in putting things in context (the red box is my add):

In my view, the drop in confidence in the military is much more likely to be principally attributable to the military being ‘collateral damage’ in a situation where political polarization and other factors have impacted trust in all government institutions (and many non-government ones as well).

Moreover, the overall decline in patriotism may well be another factor but, again, it something not specific to the military or civil-military relations.

Still, the fact remains that a very high percentage of the public is quite trustful of America’s armed forces.

Concluding observations

As Lawfire® readers may know, I’ve long-believed it best serves the country to temper the rhetoric about civil-military relations (see here). As scholar Joseph Collins puts it, “US civil-military relations are complicated, but not broken.”

This is not to say there aren’t issues. For example, the fact that the military’s rating fell 12 points since 2020, compared with the 10-point drop for institutions in general, is a matter worthy of further examination (and it may be answerable simply by the fact that percentagewise, a 12-point drop in the military’s very high rating is, relatively speaking, smaller than a 10-point drop for an institutional average that started at a lower rating).

And the military’s seemingly intractable recruiting shortfalls are, in a real way, a civil-military relations issue. (Scholars like Peter Feaver and Heidi Urben seem to agree-see here).

Furthermore, when polled in March of 2022 as to what they would do if they were in they were in the same position as Ukrainians are now: stay and fight or leave the country, a plurality of young Americans (18-34) said they would flee. Is that a civil-military relations issue? You decide but I think that could be one way to characterize it.

Additionally, Dr. Urben has grappled with the impact of social media on civil-military relations, as has other scholars see, e.g., here and here. In fact, the Department of Defense has recently issued its first policy that aims to address the complexities that technology creates for proper civil-military relations.

Discourse about social media and the military ought to continue. (There are a lot of dimensions to the impact of social media on military issues so be sure to take a look at Riley Flewelling’s LENS Essay “Not Just Words: Grappling with the Doxing of Civilians in War“ ).

So, yes, there are civil-military relations matters deserving of attention, but they are best approached in a reasoned, measured, and factual way. No one need be pollyannish about the challenges, but alarmist rhetoric is unhelpful and counter-productive.

The public deserves to have the issues put in the larger context and not be distracted by provocative headlines that clearly don’t tell the whole story.

Remember what we like to say on Lawfire®: gather the facts, examine the law, evaluate the arguments – and then decide for yourself!

sites.duke.edu · by Charlie Dunlap, J.D. · August 16, 2023

2. U.S. intelligence says Ukraine will fail to meet offensive’s key goal

Here is one case I hope US intelligence is wrong. And I am sure the Ukrainians will surprise the intelligence community again. Afterall we expected Kyiv to fall within days of Putin's attack.

U.S. intelligence says Ukraine will fail to meet offensive’s key goal

Thwarted by minefields, Ukrainian forces won’t reach the southeastern city of Melitopol, a vital Russian transit hub, according to a U.S. intelligence assessment

By John Hudson and Alex Horton

August 17, 2023 at 7:55 p.m. EDT

The Washington Post · by John Hudson · August 17, 2023

The U.S. intelligence community assesses that Ukraine’s counteroffensive will fail to reach the key southeastern city of Melitopol, people familiar with the classified forecast told The Washington Post, a finding that, should it prove correct, would mean Kyiv won’t fulfill its principal objective of severing Russia’s land bridge to Crimea in this year’s push.

The grim assessment is based on Russia’s brutal proficiency in defending occupied territory through a phalanx of minefields and trenches, and is likely to prompt finger pointing inside Kyiv and Western capitals about why a counteroffensive that saw tens of billions of dollars of Western weapons and military equipment fell short of its goals.

Ukraine’s forces, which are pushing toward Melitopol from the town of Robotyne more than 50 miles away, will remain several miles outside of the city, U.S. officials said. U.S., Western and Ukrainian government officials interviewed for this report spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military operations.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment.

Melitopol is critical to Ukraine’s counteroffensive because it is considered the gateway to Crimea. The city is at the intersection of two important highways and a railroad line that allow Russia to move military personnel and equipment from the peninsula to other occupied territories in southern Ukraine.

Ukraine launched the counteroffensive in early June hoping to replicate its stunning success in last fall’s push through the Kharkiv region.

But in the first week of fighting, Ukraine incurred major casualties against Russia’s well-prepared defenses despite having a range of newly acquired Western equipment, including U.S. Bradley Fighting Vehicles, German-made Leopard 2 tanks and specialized mine-clearing vehicles.

Joint war games conducted by the U.S., British and Ukrainian militaries anticipated such losses but envisioned Kyiv accepting the casualties as the cost of piercing through Russia’s main defensive line, said U.S. and Western officials.

But Ukraine chose to stem the losses on the battlefield and switch to a tactic of relying on smaller units to push forward across different areas of the front. That resulted in Ukraine making incremental gains in different pockets over the summer.

Kyiv has recently dedicated more reserves to the front, including Stryker and Challenger units, but has yet to break through Russia’s main defensive line.

The path to Melitopol is an extremely challenging, one and even recapturing closer cities such as Tokmak will be difficult, said Rob Lee, a military analyst with the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

“Russia has three main defensive lines there and then fortified cities after that,” he said. “It’s not just a question about whether Ukraine can breach one or two of them, but can they breach all three and have enough forces available after taking attrition to achieve something more significant like taking Tokmak or something beyond that.”

The bleak outlook, briefed to some Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill, has already prompted a blame game inside closed-door meetings. Some Republicans are now balking at President Biden’s request for an additional $20.6 billion in Ukraine aid given the offensive’s modest results. Other Republicans and, to a lesser extent, hawkish Democrats have faulted the administration for not sending more powerful weapons to Ukraine sooner.

U.S. officials reject criticisms that F-16 fighter jets or longer-range missile systems such as ATACMS would have resulted in a different outcome. “The problem remains piercing Russia’s main defensive line, and there’s no evidence these systems would’ve been a panacea,” a senior administration official said.

In an interview this week, Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the United States has been clear about the difficult task facing Ukraine.

“I had said a couple of months ago that this offensive was going to be long, it’s going to be bloody it’s going to be slow,” he told The Post. “And that’s exactly what it is: long, bloody and slow, and it’s a very, very difficult fight.”

While not achieving its objectives, he noted Kyiv’s success in degrading Russian forces. “The Russians are in pretty rough shape,” he said. “They’ve suffered a huge amount of casualties. Their morale is not great.”

U.S. officials said the Pentagon recommended multiple times that Ukraine concentrate a large mass of forces on a single breakthrough point. Though Ukraine opted for a different strategy, officials said it was Kyiv’s call to make given the profound sacrifice Ukrainian troops were making on the battlefield.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba on Thursday acknowledged the slow pace of Ukraine’s counteroffensive but said Kyiv would not stop fighting until all its land is retaken. “We don’t care how long it takes,” he told the news agency Agence France-Presse.

He encouraged critics of the offensive to “go and join the foreign legion” if they wanted faster results. “It’s easy to say that you want everything to be faster when you are not there,” he said.

Ukrainian officials have said privately that timing depends on how quickly forces can penetrate the minefields — a difficult process that has strained the military’s mine-clearing resources across a wide swath of territory.

Analysts say the challenges Ukraine has faced are multifaceted, but nearly all agree that Russia surpassed expectations when it comes to its proficiency in defending occupied territory.

“The most deterministic factor of how this offensive has gone thus far is the quality of Russian defenses,” said Lee, noting Russia’s use of trenches, mines and aviation. “They had a lot of time and they prepared them very well … and made it very difficult for Ukraine to advance.”

Questions have also been raised about how Ukraine committed its forces and in which areas.

The Ukrainians have for months poured tremendous resources into Bakhmut, including soldiers, ammunition and time, but they have lost control of the city and have made only modest gains in capturing territory around it. And while the close-in, trench-line fighting is different in Bakhmut from the problem of mines in the south, the focus has left some in the Biden administration concerned that overcommitting in the east may have eroded the potency of the counteroffensive in the south.

The new intelligence assessment aligns with a secret U.S. forecast from February indicating that shortfalls in equipment and force strength may mean that the counteroffensive will fall “well short” of Ukraine’s goal to sever the land bridge to Crimea by August. The assessment, detailed in a classified document leaked onto the social media app Discord, identified Melitopol or Mariupol as the objectives “to deny Russian overland access to Crimea.”

U.S. officials said Washington was still open to Kyiv surprising skeptics and overcoming the odds. One defense official said it is possible that Ukraine could buck historical norms and continue the counteroffensive through the winter, when everything including keeping soldiers warm and stocked with food and ammunition becomes much more difficult.

But that would rely on several important factors, such as the amount of rest troops need after a hard fighting season. It would also depend on how much specialized equipment and cold-weather clothing they have on hand, the defense official said. But Moscow may also outperform during winter military operations.

“Russians are known to be capable of fighting in cold weather,” the official said.

Leigh Ann Caldwell and Ellen Nakashima contributed to this report.

The Washington Post · by John Hudson · August 17, 2023

3. Manila Adamant Not to Kowtow to Beijing

Excerpts:

It all boils down to one thing. Marcos will stand by the promise he made in his first State of the Nation address on July 25, 2022: "I will not preside over any process that will abandon even one square inch of territory of the Republic of the Philippines to any foreign power."

This crisis has a simple solution, the academic speaking under the cover of anonymity said. China, as a member of the United Nations Security Council, he said, should honor the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea which defines the territorial sea of a coastal state as 12 nautical miles (just over 22 km), and its exclusive economic zone as not extending beyond 200 nautical miles (over 370 km).

In 2016, a tribunal at the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) on the dispute brought by the Philippines against China ruled definitively against China in its claims over ownership of the South China Sea. China, a permanent member of the Security Council, so far has refused to accept the ruling and thus the provisions of UNCLOS. If it continues to ignore these provisions, the matter, he said, should be brought before the UN General Assembly for action, including expulsion from the world body.

DEFENSE/SECURITY

Manila Adamant Not to Kowtow to Beijing

https://www.asiasentinel.com/p/philippines-adamant-not-kowtow-china?utm

Dispute over reef threatens to escalate

AUG 18, 2023

∙ PAID

By: Viswa Nathan

If China hadn’t continued to keep encroaching into Philippine territorial waters, threatening Filipino fishers and the coast guard, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. would have stayed with the foreign policy of “friend to all and enemy of none” which he defined in his first State of the Nation Address over a year ago. The tension between the two nations has escalated sharply over recent Chinese demands that the Philippines give up occupation of a reef that it has held for two and a half decades in the face of growing provocations.

For that, Marcos is now called “a true lapdog of the US,” as a Beijing loyalist in Hong Kong quipped when we met during my brief visit recently. When that remark was mentioned later in a chat with an academician back in Manila, who is closely following the tension in the West Philippine Sea, the response was: “If so, China is the reason for it.”

The academician spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid, as he put it, “attacks from local commentators on China’s payroll.” We are a democracy, he said, adding that “it allows citizens the freedom of expression whether based on belief or handsome rewards.”

For China to keep the US out of the region, and be one among equals with its neighbors, he said, it should adopt a caring attitude towards the Philippines and others in the region. “But nothing of the sort is seen, even in the days of President Duterte who voluntarily pivoted to embrace China, abandoning the US, the long-term ally with whom Manila has defense treaties.”

This situation, he pointed out, caused rethinking within the then-ruling PDP Laban, leading to Duterte appointing Teodoro L. Locsin Jr. as his fourth foreign minister in October 2018. Under Locsin’s watch, foreign policy began shifting away from being pro-Beijing, as Locsin apparently convinced President Duterte to take a firm stand against China regarding territorial claims.

Thus, Manila began filing a series of protest notes to Beijing over Chinese incursions into Philippine territorial waters and other aggressive actions. In 2021 April alone, it filed protest notes daily and vowed to file one “every day” so long as China’s vessels remained in Philippine waters. When the protest notes did not make the desired impact, a frustrated Locsin ignored all diplomatic decorum and tweeted, telling Beijing to “get the f**k out” of Philippine territorial waters.

Manila and Beijing had established a hotline between their foreign affairs departments to deal with any unexpected crisis between the two. However, Nikkei Asia’s contributing writer, Richard McGregor, recently quoted a senior Filipino diplomat as saying: "Whenever we call up the hotline with Beijing, nobody answers."

That was also the situation when Chinese boats directed water cannons earlier this month against Philippine Coast Guard vessels accompanying boats carrying supplies to the Philippine outpost in Ayungin, or the Second Thomas, Shoal in the Spratly group that comprises more than 100 small islands, and atolls, some of which are claimed by China, Taiwan, Vietnam, and Malaysia. Manila occupied Ayungin in 1999 by deliberately running aground its ship, BRP Sierra Madre, and has since been using it as an outpost on this 13-mile-long low-tide elevation.

Ayungin is located just 194.5 km west of the Philippine province of Palawan and 1,300 km from China’s nearest coast. Thus, by international law, it is well within the Philippine exclusive economic zone. But China, based on its self-proclaimed nine-dash line as its territorial boundary claims most of the South China Sea as its territory.

In its latest muscle-flexing with water cannons earlier this month, China claimed that the Philippines had committed to removing its grounded vessel from Ayungin, but it doesn’t say who exactly made the commitment on behalf of Manila.

The Marcos administration, meanwhile, is in no mood to kowtow to Beijing as its predecessor did. As the issue hots up, Marcos declared on August 9, that even if such commitments were made at all, “I rescind that agreement now.” A week later he also appointed Locsin, the man who asked Beijing to “get the f**k out” of Philippine territorial waters, and now ambassador to the United Kingdon, as his special envoy to China for special concerns.

It all boils down to one thing. Marcos will stand by the promise he made in his first State of the Nation address on July 25, 2022: "I will not preside over any process that will abandon even one square inch of territory of the Republic of the Philippines to any foreign power."

This crisis has a simple solution, the academic speaking under the cover of anonymity said. China, as a member of the United Nations Security Council, he said, should honor the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea which defines the territorial sea of a coastal state as 12 nautical miles (just over 22 km), and its exclusive economic zone as not extending beyond 200 nautical miles (over 370 km).

In 2016, a tribunal at the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) on the dispute brought by the Philippines against China ruled definitively against China in its claims over ownership of the South China Sea. China, a permanent member of the Security Council, so far has refused to accept the ruling and thus the provisions of UNCLOS. If it continues to ignore these provisions, the matter, he said, should be brought before the UN General Assembly for action, including expulsion from the world body.

4. The Dutch defense minister says the US has approved the delivery of F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine

The Dutch defense minister says the US has approved the delivery of F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine

AP · August 18, 2023

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — The United States has given its approval for the Netherlands to deliver F-16s to Ukraine, the Dutch defense minister said Friday, in a major gain for Kyiv even though the fighter jets won’t have an immediate impact on the almost 18-month war

“I welcome the US decision to clear the way for delivery of F-16 jets to Ukraine. It allows us to follow through on the training of Ukrainian pilots,” Dutch Defense Minister Kajsa Ollongren said in a message on X, formerly known as Twitter. “We remain in close contact with European partners to decide on the next steps.”

Ukraine has long pleaded for the sophisticated fighter to give it a combat edge. It recently launched a long-anticipated counteroffensive against the Kremlin’s forces without air cover, placing its troops at the mercy of Russian aviation and artillery.

Apart from delivering the warplanes, Ukraine’s allies also need to train its pilots. Washington says the F-16s, like the advanced U.S. Abrams tanks, will be crucial in the long term as Kyiv faces down Russia.

The Netherlands is part of a Western coalition that also includes Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Luxembourg, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Sweden and the United Kingdom that in July pledged to train Ukrainian pilots to fly F-16s.

Washington must give its blessing because the planes are made in the United States.

Dutch Foreign Minister Wopke Hoekstra said in a message on X that U.S. clearance to send F-16s to Ukraine “marks a major milestone” in Ukraine’s defense.

It was not immediately clear when the first F-16s could be delivered to Ukraine.

As well as the Netherlands, Denmark said in June that training Ukrainian pilots had started and the country was considering delivering jets to Kyiv, but that pilots would need six to eight months of training before a possible donation of aircraft can become a reality.

In a statement to Danish media, Defense Minister Jakob Ellemann-Jensen said that the government has several times said that a donation was “a natural step after the training.”

Meanwhile, Russian air defenses stopped drone attacks on central Moscow and on the country’s ships in the Black Sea, officials said Friday, blaming the attempted strikes on Ukraine.

Defense systems shot down a Ukrainian drone over central Moscow early Friday and some fragments fell on an exhibition center, the Russian Defense Ministry said in a statement.

It said the drone was shot down about 4 a.m. (0100 GMT) and there were no injuries or fire caused by the fragments.

However, flights were briefly suspended at all four major Moscow airports.

Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said some of the fragments fell on the grounds of the Expocentre, an exhibition complex adjacent to the Moscow City commercial and office complex that was hit twice by drones in the past month.

The area is about 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) west of the Kremlin. The defense ministry called the latest incident “another terrorist attack by the Kyiv regime.”

Naval forces also destroyed a Ukrainian sea drone that attempted an attack on Russian ships late Thursday in the Black Sea, about 240 kilometers (150 miles) southwest of Sevastopol, the ministry said

The drone was taken out by fire from a patrol boat and a corvette, it said.

It was not possible to verify the claims.

___

Heintz reported from Tallinn, Estonia.

___

Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

AP · August 18, 2023

5. Ukraine combat drone damages building in central Moscow, Russia says

Ukraine combat drone damages building in central Moscow, Russia says

Moscow’s mayor says Ukrainian drone shot down by air defence and debris falls on city’s Expo Center causing damage.

Al Jazeera English

A Ukrainian military drone crashed into a Moscow city building after it was shot down by air defence systems in the latest attack on the Russian capital by unmanned aerial vehicles.

Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said in a statement on the Telegram messaging app that air defence systems had shot down a drone early on Friday morning and debris had fallen on buildings in the city’s Expo Center complex.

The Expo Center – a large event space used for major exhibitions and conferences – is located less than 5km (3.1 miles) from the Kremlin.

A video published by Russian media outlets showed thick smoke rising next to skyscrapers in the city.

The Russian defence ministry said that Ukraine launched the drone attack at about 4am local time (01:00 GMT) “using an unmanned aerial vehicle against objects located in Moscow and the Moscow region”.

“The UAV, after being exposed to air defence weapons, changed its flight path and fell on a nonresidential building in the Krasnopresnenskaya embankment area of Moscow,” the ministry said on Telegram.

Moscow’s mayor said emergency services were on the scene, but that early reports indicated there were no casualties.

“The wreckage of the UAV fell in the area of the Expo Center, and did not cause significant damage to the building,” Sobyanin said on Telegram.

State-run news agency TASS reported that one of the walls of the Expo Center’s pavilion had partially collapsed, citing emergency services.

“The area of the collapse is about 30 square metres [323sq feet],” emergency services told TASS.

The Expo Centre, on the Krasnopresnenskaya embankment of the Moskva River, hosts regular exhibitions and trade shows, according to its website. The venue is 100 metres (328 feet) from Moscow-City, an office block in the capital’s main business district that was struck twice within days by debris from downed drone strikes this month.

Damage to an office building in Moscow-City following a reported Ukrainian drone attack on the Russian capital on July 30, 2023 [Reuters]

TASS also reported that the airspace near Moscow’s international airport of Vnukovo was briefly closed, with departures and arrivals delayed, citing the aviation service.

Moscow and its surrounding areas have come under frequent drone attacks in recent weeks, including two drone attacks that were repelled over Moscow’s financial district, with each causing minor damage to the facades of high-rise buildings. In May, drones were shot down near the Kremlin.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned last month that “war” was coming to Russia, with the country’s “symbolic centres and military bases” now targets of Kyiv.

Russia’s defence ministry also said that it thwarted a Ukrainian marine drone attack on its warships in the Black Sea on Thursday night.

Ukrainian forces had attempted to attack ships of the Russian Black Sea Fleet at 10:55pm local time (19:55 GMT) with an “unmanned sea boat” while the ships were operating in the southwestern part of the Black Sea 237km (147 miles) southwest of Sevastopol, the TASS news agency reported, citing the defence ministry.

Sevastopol is the base of Russia’s Black Sea fleet on the Moscow-annexed Crimean peninsula.

The ministry said the sea-borne drone was destroyed by the Pytlivyi frigate and the Vasily Bykov patrol ship before it could reach its target.

Russian warships also repelled a Ukrainian sea drone attack on Russia’s Novorossiysk naval base on August 4, the news agency reported.

Al Jazeera English

6. What is happening inside the Afghan resistance?

Surely someone, somewhere in the CIA or DOD/CENTCOM/SOCCENT has conducted a detailed assessment of the Afghan resistance in support of developing a campaign plan to support the Afghan resistance. But because the campaign assessment likely said it will take 10+ years to achieve favorable effects it was likely disapproved. We have no stomach for long duration campaigns especially after two decades. But a real UW campaign in support of the resistance could achieve some very useful and important effects against the Taliban that would be in the interests of the resistance, the US, and the international community.

And of course the resistance is proud of the daily or near daily operations it is conducting. But what about political mobilization? What about the underground and auxiliary networks that are required for long term success? Based on articles and commentary like this we prove we are neophytes when it comes to unconventional warfare.

What is happening inside the Afghan resistance?

“The only reason Afghans aren’t standing up against the Taliban right now is the perception that the Taliban are supported by the U.S.”

BY JEFF SCHOGOL | PUBLISHED AUG 17, 2023 4:16 PM EDT

taskandpurpose.com · by Jeff Schogol · August 17, 2023

After the United States left Afghanistan two years ago, grainy videos circulated online of resistance fighters coming together in austere regions of Afghanistan to fight the Taliban.

Today, the Taliban has control over the entire country, but they continue to face armed opposition from groups such as the National Resistance Front of Afghanistan, NRF, and Afghanistan Freedom Front, AFF. These remaining resistance groups have made little demonstrable progress though.

Since the Taliban took power in Afghanistan in August 2021, the country has faced political, economic, and humanitarian crises, and Afghan women have been banned from public life as part of a policy of gender apartheid, said Ali Maisam Nazary, head of foreign relations for the NRF.

“Basically, they’ve created the conditions of their own demise,” Nazary told Task & Purpose. “What we assess is that the Taliban’s grip on power is weakening, and we see the signs that this grip isn’t going to hold control of the whole country. In the next year or two they are going to start retreating from many parts of the country, and a void and vacuum are going to be created in those parts of the country.”

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Formed from the remnants of Afghanistan’s former security forces, the NRF is led by Ahmad Massoud, son of the legendary Mujahideen leader Ahmad Shah Massoud, who fought both the Soviets and the Taliban before he was killed by al-Qaida two days before the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

Ahmad Massoud, head of the National Resistance Front (NRF) and son of the famed Mujahideen leader Ahmed Shah Massoud, poses during a photo session in Paris on March 22, 2021. (Joel Saget/AFP via Getty Images)

One advantage that Ahmad Massoud has as the NRF’s leader is that he is not connected to any of the corruption in the former Afghan republic, so he can become a symbol of resistance, Nazary said.

Nazary claimed the NRF has roughly 5,000 members — including fighters and people who provide intelligence logistical support — and it now operates in 14 Afghan provinces. Task & Purpose was unable to independently verify that information.

“We started our fighting season this year from Kabul, our first operation was within Kabul city,” Nazary said. “We’ve been having operations on a daily basis — if not on a daily basis, every other day — in the east and northern Afghanistan, in places in central Afghanistan. As every day passes, the geography of the resistance is growing.”

So far, Afghan resistance groups have not done well on the battlefield. Ahmad Massoud left Afghanistan after the Taliban moved into the Panjshir Valley in September 2021, although fighting in the area continues. The following year, the Taliban killed Malik Khan, an NRF commander, in September 2022; and this spring the Taliban launched a successful operation against the AFF that killed one of its senior commanders, Akmal Amir.

#Panjshir: The brave soldiers of the NRF released a Taliban prisoner of war after a brief interrogation. While NRF released dozens of terrorists, the Taliban on the contrary have shown no mercy & brutally massacred dozens of NRF prisoners of war. @SR_Afghanistan #StandWithNRF pic.twitter.com/3OuvdnIpPr

— Tajikation (@TajikResistance) August 9, 2023

Nazary said the NRF conducted a strategic withdrawal from the main Panjshir Valley to side valleys because the group had changed its strategy from waging a conventional war to a guerilla campaign. The NRF now has bases in remote parts of the Hindu-Kush that the Taliban cannot access, he said.

“We are pursuing an unconventional war at this phase, so our main objective isn’t to liberate and sustain control over districts and provinces,” Nazary said. “Our objective during the phase is to exhaust the enemy, to challenge the enemy both in the battlefield and to challenge their narrative, and to strengthen ourselves and garner as much resources as we can, and to recruit as many people as we can in order to Phase 2, which is liberating and sustaining control over whole districts and provinces.”

Resistance groups like the NRF are trying to wage war against the Taliban without any help from the United States.

The U.S. government does not support armed conflict within Afghanistan, a State Department spokesperson told Task & Purpose.

“The country was at war for 44 years,” the spokesperson said. “We do not want to see a return to conflict in Afghanistan and we hear from Afghans that they don’t either.”

Newly absorbed personnel in the Afghan security forces take part in military training in the Bandejoy area of Dara district in Panjshir province on August 21, 2021. (Ahmad Sahel Arman/AFP via Getty Images)

Nazary confirmed that the NRF is not receiving material support from any foreign countries. Instead, the group has captured or bought weapons from the Taliban.

However, the NRF will need foreign assistance when the Taliban eventually collapses to avoid the Islamic State group, al-Qaida, and other terrorist groups from seizing power in Afghanistan.

“Our message to the international community is that the conflict in Afghanistan isn’t an isolated one,” Nazary said. “We are not fighting an internal war. We are not fighting a civil war. We’re continuing the Global War on Terrorism. The NRF is not only fighting against the Taliban, we’re fighting against all terrorist groups, whether it’s al-Qaida, whether it’s ISIS, whether it’s a regional terrorist group. If we want to fill that void and vacuum when it does come about, we will need the support of the international community.”

The NRF and AFF have shown that they can fight together against the Taliban, but they also face a series of challenges that continue to hinder their ability to operate successfully, said Natiq Malikzada, a political analyst, human rights activist, and journalist covering mainly northern regions of Afghanistan.

One major obstacle is that, unlike the Northern Alliance that fought the Taliban after it first took power in 1996, the current resistance groups do not have lines of communication into other countries, Malikzada told Task & Purpose.

Afghan men wave a flag above the portrait of late Afghan commander Ahmad Shah Massoud (R) in the Paryan district of Panjshir province on August 23, 2021. (Ahmad Sahel Arman/AFP via Getty Images)

“Both the NRF and the AFF are currently suffering due to the lack of a communication route with a neighboring country,” Malikzada said. “They’ve faced significant challenges and setbacks because of this limitation, and several times their members have been captured and arbitrarily executed while secretly crossing the border or trying to reinforce their forces in different parts.”

Without strategic links to the outside world, Afghan resistance groups face a shortage of money and military equipment that has made it harder for them to mobilize support among ethnic groups that are opposed to the Taliban, he said. That makes it difficult for such groups to launch large-scale operations.

In some cases, the NRF has sent volunteers back home because they did not have weapons for new recruits, Malikzada said.

Meanwhile, Afghan resistance groups have not received much coverage from the international media because the Taliban control the flow of information outside the country and foreign journalists do not have access to parts of Afghanistan where anti-Taliban groups operate, said Habiba Marhoon, a human rights advocate and founder of the Liberty Coalition, a non-profit group that raises awareness about human rights in Afghanistan.

Former Chief of General Staff of the Armed Forces Gen. Mohammad Yasin Zia, center right, along with other commanding officers visit the 777 Special Mission Wing in Kabul, Afghanistan, Wednesday, April 28, 2021. (Marcus Yam/Los Angeles Times)

The U.S. military’s abrupt withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 has also caused many Afghans to conclude the Taliban enjoys support from the United States, Marhoon told Task & Purpose.

“The only reason Afghans aren’t standing up against the Taliban right now is the perception that the Taliban are supported by the U.S.,” Marhoon said.

That sentiment was echoed by former Afghan Gen. Yasin Zia, head of the AFF, who told Task & Purpose, “The Taliban did not overthrow the government, the U.S. handed over the government to the Taliban.”

Zia, Afghanistan’s former army chief of staff and deputy defense minister, declined a Task & Purpose request for an interview.

The Taliban does not view the Afghan resistance groups as a serious threat to its rule, said Mohammad Suhail Shaheen, head of the Taliban’s political office in Doha. Shaheen claimed that the fall of the former government shows that the Afghan people have already rejected groups such as the NRF and AFF.

Armed Taliban security personnel ride a vehicle convoy as they parade near the US embassy in Kabul on August 15, 2023, during the second anniversary celebrations of their takeover. (Photo by Wakil Kohsar/AFP via Getty Images)

“The government of the Islamic Emirate has now writ all over the country,” Shaheen told Task & Purpose. “Various economic projects have been launched and the poverty is diminishing with the passage of time. Still the common people are facing problems because of sanctions. They are being punished because of political motives. I hope this comes to an end as soon as possible. The people are being punished because of political motives.”

The fact that Afghan resistance groups are often led by members of the former Afghan government can be a liability that prevents them from gaining support from abroad, said Bill Roggio, a senior fellow with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank in Washington, D.C.

“These are individuals who had their chance to change the situation, and I think many people within the United States and in the international community are having a difficult time rallying behind them,” Roggio told Task & Purpose.

Further complicating matters, the various anti-Taliban resistance groups are squabbling among themselves for primacy, preventing them from organizing into one viable group, Roggio said.

The NRF and AFF are currently conducting harassing attacks that do not directly threaten the Taliban’s rule, he said.

“In order for the resistance to gain traction, it would have to organize, take control of territory in some remote areas, and get foreign support,” Roggio said. “They need weapons. They need communications equipment, food, and money in order to buy supplies and things of that nature. The Taliban was able to persevere for 20 years because of support from Pakistan and Iran. The current Afghan resistance does not have that support at this time and it’s unlikely that they’ll have any real success without it.”

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taskandpurpose.com · by Jeff Schogol · August 17, 2023

7. Water Cannons and Lasers: South China Sea Standoff Around World War II-Era Ship Heats Up

Water Cannons and Lasers: South China Sea Standoff Around World War II-Era Ship Heats Up

The U.S. has reaffirmed that an ‘armed attack’ on its ally’s vessels would invoke its commitments under a mutual-defense treaty

https://www.wsj.com/world/china/water-cannons-and-lasers-south-china-sea-standoff-around-world-war-ii-era-ship-heats-up-6d24d8d0?mod=hp_lista_pos1&utm

By Feliz Solomon

Aug. 17, 2023 10:00 am ET

A World War II-era ship rusting atop a tiny, teardrop-shaped reef in the South China Sea has become the center of a new round of tensions between the Philippines, a U.S. ally, and China.

The Philippines ran the ship aground 2½ decades ago to assert its claim to the reef, known as Second Thomas Shoal. It keeps a small detachment of marines garrisoned aboard.

China also claims the reef—along with much of the highly contested South China Sea—and considers the grounding illegal. In recent years, its coast guard and fishing militia have built up a strong presence around the reef, shadowing and disrupting vessels supplying the dilapidated ship, called BRP Sierra Madre.

Now the dispute is flaring up. On Aug. 5, a Chinese coast-guard ship blasted a water cannon at a resupply convoy, forcing one of two supply boats to turn around and abandon its mission. Manila says the convoy was carrying food, water, fuel and other supplies for the nine marines currently aboard, and has pledged to try again soon.

Any accident or skirmish could escalate into conflict, with the potential to involve the U.S. After the Aug. 5 incident, the U.S. State Department reaffirmed that an “armed attack” on Philippine vessels would invoke its commitments under the two countries’ mutual-defense treaty.

Investors Fear China’s ‘Lehman Moment’ Is Looming

Troubles at a big trust company are making investors worry about financial contagion from property developers’ distress

By Rebecca Feng

and Weilun Soon

Aug. 18, 2023 5:43 am ET

https://www.wsj.com/finance/investing/investors-fear-chinas-lehman-moment-is-looming-4364855d?mod=hp_lead_pos1

Signs of financial stress at a large asset manager in China are making investors nervous about contagion from the country’s slumping property sector, rekindling a debate over whether a “Lehman moment” could occur in the world’s second-largest economy.

Zhongrong International Trust, a seller of esoteric financial products that had the equivalent of $108 billion in assets under management at the end of 2022, has become the market’s latest worry. Four trust products managed by the firm recently missed interest and principal payments totaling the equivalent of $14 million to three publicly listed Chinese companies, according to stock-exchange filings. Beijing-headquartered Zhongrong has provided financing to many real-estate developers and helped to fund their building projects.

Zhongrong is part of a larger, sprawling financial conglomerate called Zhongzhi Enterprise Group that owns several wealth-management businesses. If their repayment problems and defaults snowball, it could imperil many more investment products that were sold to numerous companies and wealthy individuals in China.

On social media, some individual investors said they didn’t receive promised payments from Zhongrong products and some from Zhongzhi’s other units, and have complained to local authorities. Neither company has responded publicly to the allegations, and they didn’t reply to requests for comment.

China’s trust industry, which had a total of $2.9 trillion in assets under management as of March 31, has long been a source of funding for property developers. Trust funds typically raise money from wealthy individuals and companies to invest in stocks, bonds, real-estate projects and other assets.

“Zhongzhi is a black box. They don’t have periodic disclosures, it’s a private company, and some investors don’t know what kinds of assets they’re investing in,” said Xiaoxi Zhang, an analyst at Gavekal Research.

The group’s difficulties, coming on the heels of the financial distress at Chinese property giant Country Garden Holdings, have fueled worries about China’s shadow-banking system and how intertwined it is with the property sector.

“The worry is that a ‘Lehman moment’ beckons, threatening the solvency of China’s financial system,” Zhang wrote in a note earlier this week. She added that China’s “regulatory vigilance” meant that would be unlikely.

The worries have added to widespread investor concerns about China’s floundering economy and beleaguered housing market. Prices of many Chinese stocks and corporate bonds have tumbled this month, and Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index, which is stacked with companies from China, fell into bear-market territory on Friday after declining more than 20% from its recent peak.

Economists and research analysts have long debated what could cause China’s equivalent of the 2008 collapse of Wall Street investment bank Lehman Brothers, which sent shock waves across the U.S. and global financial markets and reverberated for years afterward. Last year’s mortgage revolts in China, and China Evergrande Group’s bond defaults in 2021, also sparked worries about other dominoes toppling across the country’s financial system.

China’s property downturn has already caused dozens of developers to default on their debt, and many trusts have unwound their exposure to the sector, according to a report from Nomura.

Trust funds in China still had the equivalent of about $155 billion in exposure to the property sector at the end of the first quarter, according to data from the China Trustee Association. That “is now under great threat, in our view,” Nomura said, adding that trust funds have much larger exposures to financial markets, which increases the risk of contagion.

Zhongrong was founded in 1987 and used to be known by another name. In 2004, Zhongzhi Group took a large stake in the business, and the unit received a financial license in 2007 from China’s banking regulator. Its biggest shareholder is a state-owned textile company.

By 2014, Zhongrong had around $100 billion in trust assets under management. It lured investors with high yields, at one point promising annual returns of up to 15%, according to an individual investor.

More recently, its promised returns were around 7% to 8% annually, according to marketing documents for several trust funds seen by The Wall Street Journal. Investors who put in more money stood to earn higher returns, according to the documents, which also said the funds could invest in bank deposits, stocks, corporate bonds and other kinds of wealth-management products.

Customers were also told that they could redeem their money in six months or a year, or opt to keep their money invested for longer periods.

Some trust funds were designed to provide loans to property companies. Zhongrong would lend to developers at higher interest rates than bank loans, and receive shares of the developers’ project companies—their subsidiaries that construct homes—as collateral.

“Supporting the real economy is the responsibility and opportunity of trust in the new era,” stated a slogan on Zhongrong’s English website.

In 2020, Zhongrong’s trust funds had 18% of their assets in the property sector, according to the company’s annual reports. That came down to around 11% by 2022. In a report late last year, credit-ratings firm S&P Global said worsening macroeconomic conditions had caused credit quality to deteriorate at many property developers that work with Zhongrong, which it had rated BB+, a high speculative-grade rating.

While trust companies have no legal obligation to compensate investors in their asset management products, S&P said “the sector still faces pressure to make whole on customer investments” if their products aren’t performing. It withdrew Zhongrong’s rating in May this year on the company’s request.

Write to Rebecca Feng at rebecca.feng@wsj.com and Weilun Soon at weilun.soon@wsj.com

9. Japan scrambles jets amid Russian and Chinese naval patrol in Pacific

Timed for the JAROKUS Summit at Camp David?

Japan scrambles jets amid Russian and Chinese naval patrol in Pacific

Reuters

TOKYO, Aug 18 (Reuters) - Japan said on Friday it scrambled fighter jets after two Russian IL-38 information-gathering aircraft were spotted flying between the Sea of Japan and the East China Sea where Russia is holding a joint naval patrol and exercise with China.

Russian and Chinese navy ships have been jointly patrolling the Pacific Ocean and holding naval exercises in the East China Sea, the Russian Defence Ministry said in a statement on Friday.

"In the East China Sea, an exercise was conducted to replenish ships with water and fuel supplies from support vessels," the ministry said.

"A detachment of ships of the Russian Navy and the PLA Navy is currently operating in the waters of the East China Sea and has covered more than 6,400 nautical miles since the beginning of the patrol."

Russia and China also conducted anti-submarine exercises, repelled a simulated enemy air raid, conducted rescue training at sea and practised helicopter takeoffs and landings on the decks of warships, the ministry added.

The Russian air force activity came a day after Japan spotted Russian and Chinese naval ships crossing waters between the southern Japanese islands of Okinawa and Miyako.

Reporting by Satoshi Sugiyama in Tokyo and Guy Faulconbridge in Moscow; Writing by Kantaro Komiya; Editing by Himani Sarkar and Gareth Jones

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Acquire Licensing Rights, opens new tab

Reuters

10. War in Ukraine is a warning to China of the risks in attacking Taiwan

Hopefully so.

But there is always fear, honor, and interest and passion, reason, and chance. If those "trinities" get out of balance then all bets are off and bad things can happen.

And then there is arrogance. I am sure Xi/CPP/PLA think they are better than the Russians.

Conclusion:

There is no simple answer to the question of how the war in Ukraine has impacted Beijing’s intentions regarding Taiwan. But it has starkly illustrated to all sides that the stakes are high, and the costs of miscalculation are punitive.

War in Ukraine is a warning to China of the risks in attacking Taiwan

militarytimes.com · by Peter Rutland, Wesleyan University · August 18, 2023

Editor’s note: This commentary was first published in The Conversation.

U.S. defense strategists warn that China may use the distraction of the war in Ukraine to launch military action against Taiwan. They believe Chinese President Xi Jinping is determined to gain control over the breakaway province — which has been beyond Beijing’s control since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 — before he leaves office.

In response to these concerns, in July 2023, the U.S. announced a $345 million military aid package for Taiwan. For the first time, arms are being delivered to Taiwan from U.S. stockpiles under presidential drawdown authority, which does not require congressional approval.

Such fears have been heightened by the fact that China has stepped up its probes of Taiwan’s defenses over the past year. Last month saw the release of an eight-part docuseries by state media broadcaster CCTV titled “Chasing Dreams” about the Chinese military’s readiness to attack Taiwan.

But opinion remains divided over just how likely it is that Xi will launch a military action to occupy Taiwan, and whether the war in Ukraine makes such action more or less likely.

Factors making war more likely

The main argument that the war in Ukraine makes a Chinese attack on Taiwan more likely centers on the failure of the threat of U.S. sanctions to deter Russia from invading.

Russian President Vladimir Putin believed that U.S. power, weakened by the Trump presidency, was in decline. He also knew — because President Joe Biden said so — that the U.S. was unwilling to commit its own troops in combat against the nuclear-armed foe.

Putin saw the hasty American withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021 as a sign that the U.S. has lost its appetite for military intervention overseas. The U.S. relies on economic sanctions to pressure adversaries such as Iran, Russia and China. But Putin was confident that Europe’s dependence on Russian oil and gas would prevent it from imposing serious sanctions on Russia. He was also emboldened by the lackluster Western response to Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008 and annexation of Crimea in 2014.

It turned out that Putin was wrong about Europeans’ unwillingness to stop buying Russian energy. But he was right about the U.S. aversion to committing its own forces to defend Ukraine.

As with Ukraine, U.S. policy regarding Taiwan is built around using the threat of economic sanctions to deter China from attacking the province. However, there is also the possibility — absent in Ukraine — that the U.S. would commit its forces to defend Taiwan. The official U.S. policy is one of “strategic ambiguity” on Taiwan. Furthermore, there is the simple geographical fact that Taiwan is an island, and thus easier to defend than Ukraine.

For the people of Taiwan, Putin’s invasion shows that an authoritarian leader can wage war at any time, for no good reason. Ukraine has so far managed to prevent a Russian victory, but it is paying a heavy price in terms of lost lives and a shattered economy. According to some Taiwanese observers, the people of Taiwan would be unwilling to pay such a heavy price to preserve its political autonomy.

There is also the concern that the U.S. is so tied up with the Ukraine crisis that it does not have the political bandwidth to deal with Chinese pressure on Taiwan. Arms that could have been sold to Taiwan have been sent to Ukraine. Xi may see this as an opportunity that he can exploit.

Factors that make war less likely

There are, however, several factors that make conflict over Taiwan less probable. Russia’s failure to achieve victory in Ukraine makes it less likely that Xi would gamble on the use of military force to occupy Taiwan.

The Wall Street Journal’s Yaroslav Trofimov argues that “the Ukrainian war has focused minds in Beijing on the inherent unpredictability of a military conflict.” Meanwhile, Bi-khim Hsiao, Taiwan’s representative in the U.S., has said that Ukraine’s success in defending itself will deter China from attacking Taiwan.

One reason is advances in weaponry. The latest generation of drones and missiles capable of destroying aircraft, ships and tanks favors the defense. This makes invasion of Taiwan more risky for China. Moreover, Russia’s weapons seem to be generally less effective than those of its NATO counterparts — and China’s arsenal relies heavily on Russian designs.

Also, the Ukraine war has unified European allies behind U.S. leadership. In 2019, French President Emanuel Macron was talking about NATO being “brain dead.” After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the alliance stepped up defense spending and both Sweden and Finland applied for membership. Finland officially joined NATO in April 2023 while Sweden awaits final ratification.

The European Union was previously reluctant to join the U.S. trade war with China. However, China’s support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has made Brussels more willing to join the U.S. in pushing back against China’s efforts to dominate key sectors of global trade. EU Commission President Ursula van der Leyen said in March 2023 that “China is becoming more repressive at home and more assertive abroad.” China is all too aware that overstepping in Taiwan would further unite nations in a trade war against Beijing.

The Ukraine war has also unified core Asian allies behind U.S. leadership. Taiwan, Japan and South Korea joined the sanctions on Russia, and Japan plans to increase defense spending by 60% by 2027. In March 2022, Russia added Taiwan to its Unfriendly Countries and Territories List, and in August 2022 Taiwan canceled visa-free travel for Russians, which had been introduced in 2018.

It is difficult to assess how sanctions on Russia affect China’s decision calculus. The sanctions have seriously hurt Russia’s economy, but have not prevented the country from waging the war. Given China’s high level of trade with Europe and the U.S., it is likely that sanctions leveled in retaliation for an attack on Taiwan would be severely damaging for the Chinese economy.

In launching the abortive war on Ukraine, Russia has shown itself to be weak and unstable, and therefore less useful as an ally to China. Besides the initial failure to take Kyiv, developments such as the Wagner mutiny illustrate the fragility of the Putin regime and must have rung alarm bells in Beijing. In November 2022, Xi called for an end to threats to use nuclear weapons in an implicit rebuke to Russia.

The peace plan that China released in February 2023, “Position on the Political Settlement of the Ukraine Crisis,” insisted on the importance of respecting sovereignty while ignoring Russia’s violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty. It was arguably more about Taiwan than Ukraine.

China seemingly wants to see an end to the Ukraine war, but on terms acceptable to its ally, Moscow. China has accepted Russia’s narrative that NATO is to blame for the war, but still pays lip service to the importance of respecting Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. Those principles are central to the “One China” policy and Beijing’s claim to sovereignty over Taiwan. China’s failure to condemn the Russian invasion puts it in a position that is riven with contradictions and makes it hard to play a role as a broker for peace.

There is no simple answer to the question of how the war in Ukraine has impacted Beijing’s intentions regarding Taiwan. But it has starkly illustrated to all sides that the stakes are high, and the costs of miscalculation are punitive.

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11. Get Ukraine The Airpower It Needs Before It’s Too Late

With The F-16 announcement from Denmark it seems people are beginning to listen to Lt Gen Deptula.

Get Ukraine The Airpower It Needs Before It’s Too Late

Forbes · by Dave Deptula · August 18, 2023

MQ-9 Reaper Aircraft Flies Without Pilot (Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images)

Getty Images

As the war grinds on in Ukraine, with every kilometer reclaimed from invading Russian forces costing more lives, firepower, and time, the United States and it allied partners must do everything possible to empower President Zelensky and his forces to achieve success.

Not only is this fight vital for Ukraine, but equities regarding the entire global order are at stake—especially as China applies lessons learned from the conflict to its decision-making calculus in the Pacific. That is why recent news reports suggesting that Ukraine will not see F-16 combat aircraft and trained pilots until the middle of 2024 are particularly disturbing. Given the combined challenges of a smaller population base and perennial issues tied to a sufficient flow of arms, Ukrainians cannot wage this war indefinitely. They need decisive help fast, with airpower at the top of the list.

The move by the U.S. State Department on August 17, 2023, promising Denmark and the Netherlands that it would approve transfer of their F-16s once training of Ukrainian pilots was complete is a step in the right direction, but more needs to be accomplished in getting effective airpower to Ukraine and sooner rather than later. On the same date, a Washington Post news alert reported, “U.S. intelligence assessment says Ukraine’s counteroffensive will fail to achieve key objective.”

The imperative for combat aircraft and a robust pilot pipeline is clear: it comes down to opening an additional domain of attack, while also protecting Ukraine from strikes. This is not something armies can do alone. As Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, Ukraine’s military leader recently explained: “You can no longer do anything with just a tank with some armor, because the minefield is too deep, and sooner or later, it will stop and then it will be destroyed by concentrated fire.” Ukraine needs the attributes of the aerial dimension to project power over these obstacles, not grind through them meters at a time.

Embracing the values and virtues of airpower is something nearly every nation state has adopted since the advent of combat aviation in World War I. The reason is simple: harnessing the sky allows tremendous speed, agility, and lethality whether on offense or defense. Absent that, combatants are stuck slogging it out in the mud—with two sides bludgeoning each other until one is finally exhausted. It does not take a genius to figure out that Putin will win an attrition-centric fight against Ukraine. Russia simply has more military personnel and arms.

While the U.S. and its allies should be lauded for providing Ukraine with armaments necessary to stay alive in the face of Russia’s invasion, it is also important to recognize that this support has often been too long in arriving. The difference between winning and losing involves the element of time: assembling the right forces and employing them to net a desired objective when the conditions are right.

The generally slow decision-making processes of the U.S. and her allies have denied the Ukrainians key opportunities to route Russian forces in the earlier phases of the conflict. The delays in providing Ukraine airpower have given the Russians the gift of time and they have used it to solidify their positions providing them great advantage. This conflict could have ended last year before Putin’s armies entrenched amidst vast mine fields and supporting artillery. With that opportunity lost, it is time to expand the avenues of attack.

That is why the news this spring about the decision to provide F-16s to Ukraine was so consequential. The U.S. and its allies finally decided to provide assistance required to break the deadlock by projecting power over Russian defenses to attack key targets behind their lines—supply stores, logistics lines, command and control centers, and rear echelon forces. However, months later, F-16s and trained pilots have yet to arrive on Ukrainian flightlines and the latest predictions suggest delays will extend until 2024. As Michael Clarke, a visiting professor in the department of war studies at King’s College London, explained: “Now we may be giving them what they need, just about too late.”

That Ukraine needs help rebuilding its air force is beyond obvious. When Russia invaded last year, it had an overwhelming combat airpower advantage: 772 fighters versus Ukraine’s 69. These aircraft were also more modern and better maintained. A year and a half of combat has not improved Ukraine’s airpower position. The only way to redress this imbalance is to provide a decisive airpower surge for Ukrainian. This demands solutions at speed and scale. Not only are the mission demands high, but attrition will be substantial. The Ukrainians must be empowered to wage a decisive fight to win.

Too many pundits have wasted far too much time and energy debating what specific warplane would be best for this fight. The answer is simple: the best aircraft are the ones able to fly combat sorties the soonest. The Ukrainian people are fighting for their lives with their backs against the wall. Of course, F-16s are part of that answer. So too are other types that can be sourced, supplied with adequate spare parts, and manned with a sustainable pilot training program.

Nor should the conversation solely focus on manned aircraft. Given the threat and the nature of the missions that must be flow, the Ukrainians should also give very real consideration to the power afforded by uninhabited aircraft like the MQ-9 Reaper—along with U.S. support. Pilots remain one of Ukraine’s most precious combat commodities. Missions that are particularly risky should be executed with uninhabited aircraft first and foremost. It is far easier to backfill a plane than a pilot. Added to this, there are combined tactics that manned and unmanned aircraft can cooperatively employ to address the threat, while also focusing on achieving mission results. This does not mean flying headlong into Russian defenses, but applying comprehensive air campaign planning to appropriately deal with the threat—but that takes the right aerial tool kit.

There will be losses but look at the broader circumstances in play. What’s the cost of Ukraine losing? That outcome would not be solely measured in Ukrainian territory occupied by Russian forces. The real consequences are far broader and severe, for it would signal to adversaries around the world that they will ultimately prevail if they can outlast their opponents. Overlay that in key regions around the globe and that portends serious risk. It could also drive consequences that could put America’s sons and daughters at risk. Taken in that light, is airpower for Ukraine really that expensive or difficult to provide?

The need for these solutions is now. While the bravery of Ukraine’s armed forces is beyond question, we need to recognize that the current bloody grind is simply not sustainable absent a breakthrough. Airpower is a key attribute critical to achieve that effect. We need to get serious about increasing the rate, scale, and scope at which it is delivered. As General Douglas MacArthur famously remarked: “The history of failure in war can almost always be summed up in two words: ‘Too late.’ Too late in comprehending the deadly purpose of a potential enemy. Too late in realizing the mortal danger. Too late in preparedness. Too late in uniting all possible forces for resistance.” Given what is at stake in Ukraine and the free world, the U.S. and its allies need to commit to providing a decisive airpower advantage. That demands action at the speed of combat relevance, not officialdom.

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Lockheed-Martin (maker of the F-16) and General Atomics (maker of the MQ-9) contribute to the non-profit Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies.

Dave Deptula

Forbes · by Dave Deptula · August 18, 2023

12. Former U.S. officials urge Congress to enhance Biden's China investment order

Former U.S. officials urge Congress to enhance Biden's China investment order

Reuters

WASHINGTON, Aug 16 (Reuters) - A bipartisan group of former senior U.S. national security officials urged Congress on Wednesday to dedicate resources to President Joe Biden's recent order restricting some outbound U.S. investment to China, calling it a top priority.

Twenty-one veteran officials – including former deputy national security advisor during the Trump administration Matt Pottinger, and Colin Kahl, who stepped down in July as undersecretary of defense for policy – sent a letter to congressional leaders, calling the order "a positive step in the overdue process of limiting adversaries' access to American capital."

"The United States must ensure that [China] and other foreign adversaries aren't able to use our financial dynamism and openness against us in ways that continue to threaten our national security and prosperity," they wrote in the letter seen by Reuters, sent to Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

The further development of outbound investment transparency and review should be "among your top foreign policy priorities", they wrote, calling it essential that Congress commit resources to implementation.

Biden's order, issued last week but expected to be implemented next year, is aimed at preventing American capital and expertise from helping China develop technologies that could support its military modernization and undermine U.S. national security.

It authorizes the U.S. Treasury secretary to prohibit or restrict U.S. investments in Chinese entities in three sectors: semiconductors and microelectronics, quantum information technologies and certain artificial intelligence systems.

Peter Harrell, a former Biden National Security Council official, and former commanders of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command Harry Harris and Philip Davidson, were among the other officials who endorsed the letter.

China has said it is "gravely concerned" by the order, though some U.S. lawmakers have criticized it as having too many loopholes.

Reporting by Michael Martina; Editing by Sharon Singleton

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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Reuters

13. General Says Deterring Two 'Near Peer' Competitors Is Complex

Excerpts:

Deterrence of two near-peers is a complicated process, Cotton said. Intelligence officials must look to different capabilities, different capacities and different personalities in the leaders of near-peer nations. Still, Americans need to understand that the United States must move forward. U.S. extended deterrence rests on having credible, survivable systems. This is why U.S. nuclear triad modernization is so crucial, the general said.

Cotton gave a quick rundown on this, saying he is very comfortable with the B-21 Raider bomber the Air Force is developing. "That sixth-generation airplane is, I think, in a really good place," he said.

Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines — which will replace the Ohio-class boats — are scheduled to join the fleet in 2031. "I'd much rather say that by 2030, we would have the last Colombia … in the water, as opposed to a decade later than that," he said.

On the Sentinel missile program — which will replace the Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles, Cotton was positive. "I’m optimistic that we’re going to … do well," the general said. "The Minuteman III system, to be frank, is still an effective weapon system. As the former commander of Global Strike Command, the problem with any legacy system is the fact that the sustainment is so burdensome on the young airmen that have to maintain those weapons systems."

Sentinel will be more efficient on sustainment. "That’s why I'm looking forward to the transition to more modernized open architecture systems," he said.

General Says Deterring Two 'Near Peer' Competitors Is Complex

defense.gov · by Jim Garamone

U.S. Strategic Command is focusing on extended deterrence during a time when the country faces two near-peer rivals, said Air Force Gen. Anthony J. Cotton yesterday. The command continually assesses the threats and examines the command "for sizing and the right force posture to meet the challenges which we would face," he said during U.S. Strategic Command’s Deterrence Symposium in Omaha, Nebraska.

Takeoff Preps

An. Air Force B-52H Stratofortress assigned to the 5th Bomb Wing begins to take off as two more B-52H Stratofortresses make their way to the runway during Global Thunder 23 at Minot Air Force Base, N.D., April 16, 2023. Exercises like GT23 involve extensive planning and coordination to provide unique training opportunities for assigned units and forces.

Download: Full Size (1.66 MB)

Photo By: Air Force Staff Sgt. Michael A. Richmond

VIRIN: 230416-F-HE787-415

Russia has long been a near-peer competitor to the United States, with around 5,900 nuclear weapons in manned bombers, intercontinental missiles and submarine-launched platforms.

China today has around 350-400 nuclear weapons, and Chinese leaders have announced a program to have more than 1,000 nuclear weapons by 2030. Cotton said officials at U.S. Strategic Command take this development seriously. "What we assess and what we look at day-in and day-out is where are [the Chinese] on their readiness? Where are they on the total number of forces?" he said.

In February, Cotton notified Congress that China’s ground-based systems — which include road-mobile and silo-based weapons — "actually exceed the numbers that we have. We're not seeing any indication that they're slowing down," he said.

China is also developing a nuclear triad. Cotton said Chinese H-6N nuclear/conventional bombers "are air-to-air refuelable, and they're practicing air-to-air refueling."

China’s navy has nuclear-armed submarines that are "a full-fledged submarine leg" of the triad, the general said.

The Chinese also have a mix of mobile and fixed intercontinental missiles.

"That’s why, in my opening statement this morning [at the symposium], I said as commander of Strategic Command I am now dealing with two near-peer competitors," he said.

Missile Maintainers

A team of missile maintainers from the 791st Maintenance Squadron performs an annual load test on a Transporter Erector Emplacement System at Minot Air Force Base, N.D., May 5, 2022. The Transporter Erector transports, stores, removes and emplaces the Minuteman III Missile.

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Photo By: Air Force Airman Alysa Knott

VIRIN: 220505-F-RC297-1006

Deterrence of two near-peers is a complicated process, Cotton said. Intelligence officials must look to different capabilities, different capacities and different personalities in the leaders of near-peer nations. Still, Americans need to understand that the United States must move forward. U.S. extended deterrence rests on having credible, survivable systems. This is why U.S. nuclear triad modernization is so crucial, the general said.

Cotton gave a quick rundown on this, saying he is very comfortable with the B-21 Raider bomber the Air Force is developing. "That sixth-generation airplane is, I think, in a really good place," he said.

Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines — which will replace the Ohio-class boats — are scheduled to join the fleet in 2031. "I'd much rather say that by 2030, we would have the last Colombia … in the water, as opposed to a decade later than that," he said.

Work Watch

Ed Ingles, executive director of Trident Refit Facility in Bangor, Washington, discusses the capabilities of the command’s periscope shop with Navy Capt. Mark Parrella, right, and Navy Capt. Tim Clark, Oct. 26, 2022. Parrella is program manager for the Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine; Clark is program manager for in-service ballistic missile submarines.

Download: Full Size (3.86 MB)

Photo By: Michael Hatfield, Navy

VIRIN: 221026-N-MG575-1010

On the Sentinel missile program — which will replace the Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles, Cotton was positive. "I’m optimistic that we’re going to … do well," the general said. "The Minuteman III system, to be frank, is still an effective weapon system. As the former commander of Global Strike Command, the problem with any legacy system is the fact that the sustainment is so burdensome on the young airmen that have to maintain those weapons systems."

Sentinel will be more efficient on sustainment. "That’s why I'm looking forward to the transition to more modernized open architecture systems," he said.

defense.gov · by Jim Garamone

14. Embrace the Nerd: Dungeons & Dragons and Military Intelligence

Excerpts:

In the face of extreme skepticism, ask for this to be a pilot program: As a possible measure of effectiveness, offer to have a subordinate give an intelligence brief to the unit both before and after the tabletop role-playing game training cycle with surveys to see what the audience remembers. Lieutenant von Reisswitz also faced initial skepticism about integrating wargames into military training, when a general was reported to have said, “You mean we are to play for an hour on a map!” And now, due to the history of Prussian military success, wargames, both large and small, are an accepted part of military culture. Tabletop role-playing games may eventually be as well.

As the U.S. military moves from counter-insurgency toward great power competition, military intelligence professionals must be ready to deal with complex and dynamic adversaries acting in an increasingly complex and dynamic world. Now is the time for experimentation to learn new skill sets and find new ways to fulfill the intelligence professional’s mandate. Dungeons and Dragons is a powerful tool to do just that. If you get to kill some imaginary orcs along the way, all the better.

Embrace the Nerd: Dungeons & Dragons and Military Intelligence - War on the Rocks

IAN STREBEL AND MATT MCKENZIE

warontherocks.com · by Ian Strebel · August 18, 2023

In 2019, one of us found himself briefing a commander on a reported threat to U.S. servicemembers stationed in his Middle Eastern area of responsibility. We’re both military intelligence officers and as such are required to report all threats, even though this particular piece of intelligence was single-source information with no evidence of further planning. Matt — the military intelligence officer in question — repeatedly emphasized these caveats, but the damage was done. The next day, the commander restricted everyone to base, claiming “snatch squads” roamed the area, ready to kidnap Americans.

A military intelligence professional can spend months building an understanding of an adversary’s capabilities, tactics, and intent, collecting exquisite intelligence and developing multiple possible enemy courses of action. But if they cannot overcome a commander’s deeply held notions about an adversary, all that work can be for naught. This is what happened with Matt’s commander: he saw the terrorist threat in his area of responsibility as much more capable than all evidence to the contrary indicated. In this instance, the only consequence was a dull weekend for the command, but in a more threatening environment, the results could have been much more catastrophic.

In a perfect world, a commander and their intelligence team would have a relationship built on trust. Often, commanders and intelligence personnel are the only people with the same access to classified information, so theoretically, they can have free-flowing conversations where the commander and intelligence team challenge each other’s presumptions. However, due to the constant change of personnel and the operational pressures on commanders, often the only exposure intelligence personnel have to the commander is through irregular intelligence briefs. Without a developed relationship, building a compelling narrative becomes even more important.

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The only way to overcome a deeply held narrative is to replace it with a more convincing one, and the ability to make a convincing narrative takes practice and training. This is, unfortunately, not available through traditional military training, but we have discovered a means of honing this skill at no cost to the taxpayer. We grabbed some twenty-sided dice and the Dungeon Master’s Guide and played Dungeons & Dragons.

Humans Are Storytellers — So Are Commanders

A 1944 study by Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel showed students short animated clips of various geometric shapes moving around a screen. After watching the screen for around two-and-a-half minutes, all but one student developed elaborate stories about the shapes: two triangles fought over a circle, or a triangle chased the other shapes. Humans create stories out of almost nothing.

Military commanders are no exception. By the time officers reach a command where they are in charge of hundreds to thousands of people, they have engaged in exercises and operations for years. These officers have received hundreds of briefs — both good and bad — and have developed their own internal narratives about the capabilities and intents of the U.S. military, its allies and partners, as well as its adversaries. These stories carve deep grooves in a commander’s brain, leading many to conduct their own bootstrap intelligence analysis, just as Matt’s commander did.

Counter-insurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan reinforced the idea that commanders have all the information they need to make decisions on their own. There, commanders would build relationships with leaders of various factions (friendly, unfriendly, or somewhere in between) without trained intelligence professionals. They watched live feeds from airborne intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance aircraft showing “bad guys” in real time, without understanding the time and effort that go into the full-motion video analysis and pattern of life development needed to find those “bad guys.” In this context, some commanders were led to believe that intelligence was easy.

This can be a big problem for military intelligence professionals — they are trained to deliver intelligence, not to tell stories, so the stories that commanders tell themselves win out. Despite studies showing people are far more likely to remember stories than statistics, the military trains new intelligence professionals to brief intelligence through rote memorization and presentation of information. Neither of us ever received formal training in how to present information and intelligence as a story. This breeds uncreative military intelligence professionals concerned more with being “right” or having all the facts than whether their information is absorbed. Often, when information is presented in this manner, without context, commanders don’t remember what is important or, more importantly, why something is important.

In the absence of formal training on how to build a narrative, military intelligence professionals should find a way to turn this limited information into a story that presents a commander with a range of possible enemy actions. This should be more in-depth than the “enemy courses of action” slide at the end of most military intelligence PowerPoint presentations, which present the commander with the “most likely” and “most dangerous” courses of action the enemy might take. This, of course, is very limiting; there are an infinite number of possibilities between these two scenarios.

Military intelligence personnel instead need to build compelling narratives based on the wide resources, deep research, and analytical training available to them. Learning to do this on one’s own can be hard, but Dungeons & Dragons provides the storytelling training that schoolhouses lack, which can train intelligence professionals to constructively challenge commanders and help ensure mission success.

Tabletop Role-Playing Games as Wargaming Preparation

Dungeons & Dragons and other tabletop role-playing games are played by a group of people collaborating to create a fantastical story bounded by specific rulesets. Dice rolls add probabilistic elements to the story, which force players to react spontaneously to solve tactical and strategic puzzles. One player narrates the experience by describing the world and initial problem set while simultaneously playing the part of the opposing force (monsters) and other nonplayer characters (potential hostile, neutral, or friendly actors). This player is called the “Dungeon Master” in Dungeons & Dragons, or “Game Master” in most other games, and is responsible for ensuring a fun and cohesive experience.

Militaries have used wargames to train ever since Lieutenant Georg Heinrich Rudolf Johann von Reisswitz introduced the concept to an initially skeptical Prussian General Staff in the early nineteenth century. Very simply, a traditional wargame is a board game that simulates some aspects of military combat. The popular game of Risk is a very simple wargame, while chess can be considered as one of the oldest. Wargames can be successful mediums for training, in part, because the narrative holds players responsible for their actions and emotionally attaches them to the game’s results. Tabletop role-playing games are just the modern evolution of the classic wargame. The first version of Dungeons & Dragons, released in 1974, was a revised version of a wargame called Chainmail: Rules for Medieval Miniatures. This revised system allowed players to “connect multiple wargame sessions together” and “collaborate with each other inside an imaginary world that was not imposed by an author.”

Tabletop role-playing games are unique from traditional wargames because the collaborative nature of the game means that almost anything can happen. The rules of these games only help structure the narrative and determine the consequences of actions. Players are free, even encouraged, to try anything they can imagine within the limits of that narrative. Most tabletop role-playing games have several rulebooks, but, as with military doctrine, the rules do not and cannot account for every eventuality. Instead, games such as Dungeons & Dragons rely on players’ creativity and flexibility to develop and adapt rules as they go. One of the most essential aspects of such games is the application of chance, usually employed by rolling various-sided polyhedral dice, which encourages out-of-the-box thinking for players and Dungeon Masters, especially in the face of catastrophic failure or, just as critical, catastrophic success.

These rules, when applied to wargames, can make them better — we have firsthand experience with this. Ian acted as an observer during a 2023 joint wargame using the Marine Corps’ Operational Wargame System. During the wargame, an experienced aviator wrestled with the decision of whether to use an exquisite munition to attack a threat reconnaissance drone or let the drone continue unimpeded. Recalling recent footage showing a Russian fighter jet dumping fuel on a U.S. surveillance drone, which downed the MQ-9 into the Black Sea, the aviator said he’d do the same. The wargame moderator said it was a “nice try” but that the move was outside the rules. If, instead, they’d abided by tabletop role-playing game rules, the aviator and moderator would play out the situation. Most likely, the moderator or Dungeon Master would determine, on the fly, the probability of the move’s success based on the game-defined attributes of the two aircraft and ask the aviator to roll a die. The Dungeon Master would use the die results to determine success or failure.

An experienced Dungeon Master might further adjudicate the results by applying a range of outcomes based on the die roll. For example, on a twenty-sided die, a roll of a “1” (critical failure) might result in the loss of the friendly aircraft with no damage to the drone, while a roll of “20” (critical success) might down the drone with minimal fuel loss and allow recovery of the drone sensor equipment. Rolls in between could result in varying degrees and combinations of damage and fuel loss to both the friendly aircraft and drone, as deemed reasonable by the Dungeon Master. Simultaneously, the Dungeon Master would determine the enemy’s reaction to this unanticipated event, both tactically and strategically, as well as the opposing force’s long-term adaptation to this move.

This is not so different from a military intelligence professional’s job: think like the enemy, understand their capabilities, develop possible scenarios, and then play the adversary as operators run through their plans. As previously discussed, while service intelligence schools generally teach presenting just a few courses of action, in a real conflict, there are infinite threat scenarios. Modern intelligence professionals must be flexible, responsive, and creative, in both planning and ad hoc operations. The problem is, short of an actual conflict, there are practically no opportunities for these personnel to practice working in a wide-open world — this is where tabletop role-playing games could prove valuable. As Dungeon Masters, military intelligence professionals can build worlds and scenarios and act as the enemy, or red, force. Most importantly, they will learn to respond spontaneously to unexpected player actions — regardless of whether those actions are incredibly clever or incredibly stupid.

Becoming Intelligence Storytellers

In the Netflix series The Diplomat, Keri Russell succinctly described the problem of intelligence storytelling in three short sentences: “Intelligence is a story. A story based on incomplete facts. Life or death decisions turn on whether people buy the story.” While she was talking about telling stories to presidents and prime ministers, the logic applies to all levels of command, as well as to wargames. As Dr. Ed McGrady explained in War on the Rocks: “[W]argames are also stories. While we can debate the differences and similarities between games and narratives, designing and playing a wargame inherently involves storytelling. …The stories games tell matter because they are the way we create new ideas and understandings to feed into the cycle of research.”

For now, military intelligence professionals must develop these storytelling skills independently. When giving an intelligence brief, they have a limited period in which to describe the enemy, the threat capabilities, and the environment, all of which could be new to the commander. The intelligence professional might be able to use a map or other visual aids, but ultimately, they have to present intelligence in a manner that enables commanders or operators to remember what is essential, even much later, under combat conditions. Telling good stories can save lives.

Now consider the job of a Dungeon Master: they must tell a compelling story, usually set in an environment unfamiliar to the players. When threats are encountered, the Dungeon Master must accurately explain the nature of the threat by sight, sound, feel, and smell, because, of course, the players have never experienced a nest of snake-demons in real life. Dr. James Fielder explained that when games are designed correctly, a synthetic environment is created that becomes real to the players. In such an environment, the learning becomes real even if the risk is not — at least not yet. This is the challenge for both Dungeon Masters and military intelligence professionals. Telling a compelling story that enables others to envision combat environments and the threats within them accurately can be the difference between success and failure.

Military intelligence professionals should, of course, be careful with the story they craft and clearly articulate differences between known facts and intelligence assessments, because to make informed decisions, commanders must understand what is known as well as what is possible. Intelligence professionals should use facts to weave assessments so that commanders, staff, and operators think creatively without being distracted by the story itself. This takes practice, just like any other skill. Attempting novel briefing techniques when not properly prepared can have disastrous results.

For example, during one tactical wargame Ian witnessed, a fellow intelligence officer took an untested, story-based approach to briefing the commander. Playing the part of the enemy commander, the officer narrated threat disposition and courses of action in the first person. While an interesting and possibly effective approach, the officer became so wrapped up in the story that he forgot the purpose of the brief: providing the commander with a clear picture of the threat. The briefer failed to use doctrinal terminology understood by the commander and staff and ignored assessments provided by supporting units. Luckily, this occurred during a wargame, so no lives were lost. But this is one of the few instances in an intel professional’s career where that will be the case.

Tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons give intelligence professionals a safe, zero-risk environment to practice storytelling, minimizing potentially lethal mistakes in training and real-world scenarios. Storytelling needs to be practiced, just like flying or marksmanship. Pilots can safely make mistakes in simulators or with instructors in the cockpit. Shooters can miss targets on a range until they understand the weapon firing process. Similarly, Dungeons & Dragons provides intelligence personnel the opportunity to practice storytelling with the ability to make and learn from mistakes. After all, if a dragon kills a party of adventurers because the Dungeon Master wasn’t clear, they can simply try again. There are no second chances when giving an operational intelligence briefing before a strike mission.

Be All the Nerd You Can Be

Wargaming has seen a resurgence in professional military education, something we wholeheartedly support; games make learning fun, effective, and memorable. But integrating games into this education isn’t enough. The armed services only send a military intelligence professional to formal training a few times over a long military career. Comparatively, tabletop role-playing games can provide regular practice for the skills needed in exercises, wargaming, and the real world. After all, as James Sterrett, chief of the Simulation Education Division at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, said, “Experience is a great teacher and well-designed games can deliver experiences that are tailored to drive home learning.”

If you are interested in integrating tabletop role-playing games into training for military intelligence professionals, it will likely prove challenging to convince commanders that subordinates should spend work hours “playing a game.” However, if games are structured like training, commanders could perhaps be brought around. First and most important: create a training plan. There would need to be learning objectives, measures of performance and effectiveness, lesson plans, and a schedule. Have the required materials ready; convert them from the standard Dungeons & Dragons style (filigree and stylized dragons in the margins) into something that looks like a Department of Defense form. Don’t plan an epic, multi-year campaign. Instead, take and edit short adventures that can be completed in around two hours.

Next, present the plan and justification to the chain of command. Be ready to answer a lot of questions. Be ready to be told “no.” Emphasize professional development — this is always a viable reason in the military. Wargaming is already built into the upper echelons of military learning; tabletop role-playing games are simply more advanced, if smaller, wargames.

In the face of extreme skepticism, ask for this to be a pilot program: As a possible measure of effectiveness, offer to have a subordinate give an intelligence brief to the unit both before and after the tabletop role-playing game training cycle with surveys to see what the audience remembers. Lieutenant von Reisswitz also faced initial skepticism about integrating wargames into military training, when a general was reported to have said, “You mean we are to play for an hour on a map!” And now, due to the history of Prussian military success, wargames, both large and small, are an accepted part of military culture. Tabletop role-playing games may eventually be as well.

As the U.S. military moves from counter-insurgency toward great power competition, military intelligence professionals must be ready to deal with complex and dynamic adversaries acting in an increasingly complex and dynamic world. Now is the time for experimentation to learn new skill sets and find new ways to fulfill the intelligence professional’s mandate. Dungeons and Dragons is a powerful tool to do just that. If you get to kill some imaginary orcs along the way, all the better.

Become a Member

Ian Strebel and Matt McKenzie are commissioned military intelligence officers in the United States Army and Navy, respectively. They met playing Dungeons & Dragons at Eskan Village in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Ian currently serves on the Army’s Long- Range Precision Fires Cross Function Team having previously served with the 1st, 2nd and 4th Infantry Divisions, 10th Mountain Division, 513th Military Intelligence Brigade, Allied Command Counterintelligence, and Office of the Program Manager-Saudi Arabia National Guard.

Matt is head of intelligence partner engagements at United States Cyber Command, after serving in the United States Military Training Mission-Riyadh, Joint Staff J2, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, Strike Fighter Squadron Three-Seven, and Commander, Naval Forces Korea. He can be found on Twitter @PhoneCommander.

The views expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the official policy of the U.S. Navy, U.S. Army, Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Ian Strebel · August 18, 2023

15. Don’t Recognize the Taliban Government

Excerpts:

Put simply, there is no evidence that any Taliban policies are affected by external pressure. The group has cracked down on its opponents without a backlash and has managed internal squabbles without giving its adversaries an opening to exploit. And when it has taken steps that please other countries—such as launching a campaign to eradicate the poppy cultivation that had fueled the global trade in heroin—it has made the decision unilaterally and for its own reasons.

There may come a moment when the Taliban will decide to change course. As Ronald Neumann, a former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, suggested in an article in The Hill, Washington should remain flexible in its responses to what the Taliban does and consider confidence-building measures such as easing sanctions on groups and individuals who work with Taliban authorities, which make it more difficult to assist Afghans directly.

But no one should harbor any illusions about the prospects. It is striking that two years after the fall of Kabul, not one of the world’s 193 governments has recognized the Taliban—not even Pakistan. This past June, the UN Special Representative for Afghanistan told the UN Security Council that recognition “is nearly impossible” as long as restrictive decrees on women and girls remain in place. And given the history of enmity between the United States and the Taliban—and the group’s seemingly unshakable commitment to oppressing half the country’s population—the United States should not be the country to take the first steps toward normalization.

Don’t Recognize the Taliban Government

Deepening Ties Won’t Moderate Afghanistan’s Brutal Rulers

By P. Michael McKinley

August 18, 2023

Foreign Affairs · by P. Michael McKinley · August 18, 2023

Two years after taking Kabul, the Taliban are consolidating their control of Afghanistan even as they remain mostly shunned by the rest of the world. Although much of the Afghan population faces dire economic conditions, an often predicted catastrophic humanitarian crisis has yet to materialize, and the economy is stabilizing somewhat in the face of still formidable challenges. Despite an insurgency spearheaded by the local affiliate of the Islamic State (also known as ISIS), for most Afghans, security is better than at any time since the early years following the U.S.-led invasion in 2001. Reported rifts in the Taliban’s leadership have not significantly affected the grip of the country’s theocratic regime, headed from Kandahar by Supreme Leader Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada, which has imposed ever more draconian restrictions on women and girls, undoing two decades of changes that had brought them basic human rights and access to the public sphere.

Meanwhile, the international community has begun to accommodate itself to the reality of a Taliban-led Afghanistan. Although no country formally recognizes the Taliban government, a number of countries in the region—including China and Russia—have taken steps toward establishing ties. And India, Japan, the European Union, and the United Nations have reopened or retained diplomatic missions in Kabul.

As it becomes clearer that Taliban rule is likely to endure for the foreseeable future, a small but growing number of commentators and analysts have begun to debate whether it is time for the United States to deal more directly with the Taliban—including possibly restoring a U.S. presence in Kabul and even formally recognizing the Taliban government. The analysts Graeme Smith and Ibraheem Bahiss argued in Foreign Affairs that addressing the country’s dire humanitarian situation, confronting terrorist organizations in Afghanistan, and improving regional security all require more official engagement with the Taliban. The Economist suggested that isolation has only strengthened Taliban hardliners. In Foreign Policy, Javid Ahmad, a former Afghan diplomat, and Douglas London, a former CIA operations officer, went further still, calling for the United States to establish official diplomatic ties with the Taliban government.

Such arguments are seductive. Distasteful though the prospect might be, taking steps toward normalizing relations with the Taliban government could arguably serve a number of objectives central to U.S. foreign policy. U.S. officials have periodically met with Taliban officials outside Afghanistan on an ad hoc basis in pursuit of humanitarian, human rights, and counterterrorism objectives in Afghanistan. Such efforts should continue. And the time may well come when it makes sense for Washington to consider a full diplomatic presence in Kabul.

But that time has not yet arrived. There is no indication that the Taliban’s calculations have been influenced by the pressing need for humanitarian assistance or the diplomatic presence in Kabul of countries and organizations that some expected could have a moderating effect. If anything, Taliban rule has grown only harsher.

And as Shaharzad Akbar, the former chairperson of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, and Melanne Verveer, a former U.S. ambassador for global women’s issues, have highlighted, there is one critical constituency that would be even more damaged if the United States prematurely accommodated the Taliban diplomatically: Afghan women and girls. There is a tendency to relativize their plight by placing it in the broader context of challenges the international community faces in Afghanistan. But unless the Taliban signals that it is willing to grant fundamental rights to women and girls, it is hard to envisage what a formalized U.S. presence in Kabul would represent other than a tacit endorsement of the Taliban’s deepening theocratic despotism.

LIMITED ENGAGEMENT

The United States has a long history of maintaining full diplomatic ties with authoritarian regimes and governments that violate human rights. Although relations have been suspended on many occasions because of war or political tensions, sustained breaks in ties since 1945 have been few and far between. Currently, the list of countries totally shunned by Washington is short: Afghanistan, Iran, North Korea, and Syria. Diplomatic isolation, moreover, has rarely achieved its goals—as demonstrated by the endurance of the regimes in all four of those countries.

Furthermore, were Washington to move toward a more formal relationship with the Taliban government, it would not be alone. Not surprisingly, one country that maintains links with Kabul is Pakistan, which once served as the primary sanctuary for the Taliban insurgency. But Pakistan hardly offers a credible model for other countries, and today it faces the irony of coming under attacks by terrorist groups supported by its former allies in Kabul.

There is no evidence that any Taliban policies are affected by external pressure.

But Pakistan is hardly the only country dealing with the Taliban. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are also broadly engaging with the group’s leadership. Emirati companies have won contracts to run Afghanistan’s airports, and the Taliban’s acting defense minister met with UAE President Muhammed bin Zayed in December 2022 to discuss cooperation. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was photographed shaking hands with Mullah Yaqoob, son of the Taliban founder Mullah Omar, in Saudi Arabia on the occasion of the Hajj pilgrimage. In May, the prime minister of Qatar, Mohammed al-Thani, held a secret meeting with Akhundzada in Kandahar, according to Reuters. Farther afield, the Taliban’s foreign minister has met with his Chinese counterpart; Taliban representatives have visited Indonesia; and Indian, EU, and UN officials have visited Kabul.

These countries and organizations have different reasons for dealing with the Taliban. Some want to work with the group out of a desire to aid the Afghan people. Others want to respond to the growing presence of terrorist organizations in the country or try to moderate Taliban policies on women and girls. Still others hope to counter Chinese and Russian influence in a country that may be rich in critical minerals.

For its part, Washington would like to do all those things. A U.S. diplomatic presence could also make it easier to assist the more than 100,000 Afghans who helped American forces and personnel during two decades of war but were left behind by the hurried U.S. evacuation in August 2021. Washington would also likely have a better understanding of what is happening inside Afghanistan and be able to calibrate policy accordingly.

NOT THE TIME OR PLACE

But Washington must operate under a unique set of constraints. Al Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks on the United States were largely planned in Afghanistan while al Qaeda was enjoying sanctuary there thanks to the Taliban. U.S. forces then toppled the first Taliban government and led the international coalition against a Taliban insurgency. The group declared victory in the long war against the United States and sees no need to make concessions now.

That legacy cannot be shrugged off, and any move to soften Washington’s line against the Taliban might produce a political backlash at home, especially in the run-up to a presidential election in 2024. Indeed, late last month, the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Michael McCaul, a Republican representative from Texas, warned U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken against allowing U.S. officials to travel to Afghanistan, arguing that any such visit would constitute “an egregious betrayal of the memories of the fallen and the millions of Afghans who continue to hope for a free, prosperous, democratic Afghanistan.”

Even without any official presence in Kabul, however, Washington has hardly been passive since the city fell to the Taliban. Although humanitarian assistance is largely channeled through the UN system and its network of local partners, the United States has been in the forefront of mobilizing almost $1 billion in aid for the Afghan people. There is little reason to think that a U.S. presence on the ground would increase or improve that flow. Although the needs of Afghanistan’s population are still staggering, there are indications that Afghanistan’s economy is stabilizing in some respects. “Essential food and non-food commodities are available in major markets nationwide,” according to the June World Bank Afghanistan Economic Monitor report.

U.S. diplomats have also met with the Taliban to discuss security and political issues since the fall of Kabul, most recently last month in Qatar, when Tom West, the U.S. special representative for Afghanistan, discussed human rights (especially those of women and girls) with Amir Khan Mutaqqi, the Afghan foreign minister, and discussed the economy with officials of the central bank and the Ministry of Finance.

Women are now almost entirely forbidden from working outside the home.

They also discussed security issues. A strike that U.S. forces launched last summer that killed the al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in downtown Kabul may have persuaded the Taliban to think again about openly supporting international jihadists. According to CNN, a few months later, David Cohen, the deputy director of the CIA, met with the Taliban’s head of intelligence, Abdul Haq Wasiq. Earlier this year, U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters that U.S. officials were “working tirelessly every day” to make sure the Taliban stick to their pledge to not allow Afghanistan to be used as a safe haven for groups plotting to attack the United States.

Again, it is hard to see what an American presence in Kabul would add to those efforts. Diplomatic pressure from other countries and international organizations which do have a presence on the ground has not prevented the Taliban from erasing the rights of girls, who are now banned from secondary schools and sports facilities. Women must cover themselves in public and are now almost entirely forbidden from working outside the home, including for international relief organizations. Last month, the Taliban eliminated the final public gathering places available to women when it ordered all beauty salons to close.

Put simply, there is no evidence that any Taliban policies are affected by external pressure. The group has cracked down on its opponents without a backlash and has managed internal squabbles without giving its adversaries an opening to exploit. And when it has taken steps that please other countries—such as launching a campaign to eradicate the poppy cultivation that had fueled the global trade in heroin—it has made the decision unilaterally and for its own reasons.

There may come a moment when the Taliban will decide to change course. As Ronald Neumann, a former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, suggested in an article in The Hill, Washington should remain flexible in its responses to what the Taliban does and consider confidence-building measures such as easing sanctions on groups and individuals who work with Taliban authorities, which make it more difficult to assist Afghans directly.

But no one should harbor any illusions about the prospects. It is striking that two years after the fall of Kabul, not one of the world’s 193 governments has recognized the Taliban—not even Pakistan. This past June, the UN Special Representative for Afghanistan told the UN Security Council that recognition “is nearly impossible” as long as restrictive decrees on women and girls remain in place. And given the history of enmity between the United States and the Taliban—and the group’s seemingly unshakable commitment to oppressing half the country’s population—the United States should not be the country to take the first steps toward normalization.

P. MICHAEL McKINLEY is a Nonresident Senior Adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He served as U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan from 2014 to 2016.

Foreign Affairs · by P. Michael McKinley · August 18, 2023

16. Russian, Chinese Warships in East China Sea After Sailing Near Alaska

Russian, Chinese Warships in East China Sea After Sailing Near Alaska - USNI News

news.usni.org · by Dzirhan Mahadzir · August 17, 2023

JMSDF Image

The joint Russian Navy – People’s Liberation Navy (PLAN) flotilla that sailed near Alaska and the Aleutian Islands in early August is now operating in the East China Sea, according to a Thursday Japan Ministry of Defense release.

The flotilla has been sailing together since July 27, when it departed from Vladivostok, Russia. At that time it consisted of 10 ships: Russian Navy destroyers RFS Admiral Panteleyev (548) and RFS Admiral Tributs (564); corvettes RFS Gremyashchiy (337) and RFS Hero of the Russian Federation Aldar Tsydenzhapov (339); and fleet tanker Pechenga, while the PLAN ships are Chinese destroyers CNS Guiyang (119) and CNS Qiqihar (121); frigates CNS Zaozhuang (542) and CNS Rizhao (598); and fleet oiler CNS Taihu (889).

When the flotilla sailed near Alaska, it had 11 ships, according to a joint statement by Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska). However, no details were disclosed on the identity of the ships. The 11th ship, identified as Dongdiao class surveillance ship Kaiyangxing (796) by the Joint Staff Office of the Japanese Ministry of Defense, is still with the flotilla, according to the Thursday release.

The original 10 ships and Kaiyangxing transited La Perouse Strait to enter the Sea of Okhotsk between July 28-29, which makes it likely that Kaiyangxing was the 11th ship sighted when the flotilla sailed near Alaska, according to the JSO release.

The Japanese spotted the flotilla at 9 a.m. Tuesday, as it sailed westward in an area 280km northeast of Okinotorishima, a coral reef located in the Philippine Sea that is administered by Japan, according to the JSO release.

JMSDF Image

On Wednesday, the flotilla was sighted sailing west in an area 50km south of Oki Daito Island. It sailed northwest Thursday to transit the Miyako Strait between Miyako Island and Okinawa and then entered the East China Sea.

Japan Maritime Self Defense Force (JMSDF) destroyers JS Umigiri (DD-158) and JS Sawagiri (DD-157), minesweeper JS Yakushima (MSC-602) and JMSDF P-3C Orions Maritime Patrol Aircraft (MPA) of Fleet Air Wing 5 based at Naha Air Base, Okinawa, shadowed the flotilla, according to the JSO release.

The Russian-China Joint Patrol is the third one that the two countries have carried out. The patrols have been carried out on an annual basis.

On Monday, China Ministry of National Defense spokesperson Senior Col. Wu Qian pushed back against criticisms of the joint patrol during a press briefing.

“The cooperation between the Chinese and Russian militaries is completely different from the practices of some other countries that cling to the Cold War mentality, engage in camp confrontation and bully hegemony everywhere,” Wu said.

Naval vessels of Chinese and Russian militaries recently conducted joint maritime patrols in relevant waters of the western and northern Pacific Ocean based on the annual cooperation plan between the two militaries and abided by international law, he said. Patrols did not target any third party and had nothing to do with the current international and regional situation.

Wu also criticized Japan’s close-range surveillance, saying it was very dangerous, and could easily lead to causing misunderstanding, misjudgment and accidents at sea and in the air. He urged Japan to cease the practice.

“Unlike some other countries’ clinging to the Cold War mentality, engaging in camp confrontation and hegemony everywhere, the cooperation between the Chinese and Russian militaries is open and transparent, and aims to jointly defend international fairness and justice and maintain world and regional security and stability,” Wu said.

On Thursday, the PLAN’s 43rd Chinese Naval Escort Taskforce consisting of destroyer CNS Nanning (162), frigate CNS Sanya (574) and fleet oiler Weishanhu (887) arrived at the Port Klang Cruise Terminal, Port Klang, Malaysia, which lies along on the Malacca Strait, according to a Facebook post by the Royal Malaysian Navy (RMN) National Hydrographic Center.

The cruise terminal used to be the Glenn Cruise Terminal when it served as the headquarters for Glenn Defense Marine Asia, owned by Leonard “Fat Leonard” Francis. It was sold off following Francis’s arrest in 2013.

China’s 43rd Chinese Naval Escort Taskforce is an anti-piracy escort taskforce. The PLAN has been deploying its anti-piracy escort task forces to the Gulf of Aden since 2009.

The 43rd Chinese Naval Escort Taskforce had handed off its mission to the 44th Naval Escort Taskforce consisting of destroyer CNS Zibo (156), frigate CNS Jingzhou (532), and fleet oiler CNS Qiandaohu (886) on June 2

It has since conducted various port visits to African nations before carrying out its homeward-bound voyage.

news.usni.org · by Dzirhan Mahadzir · August 17, 2023

China ‘contagion’ talk is last thing financial world needs

Shadow bank’s financial troubles are latest sign China’s property woes are rippling through the economy and imperilling global markets

asiatimes.com · by William Pesek · August 18, 2023

China’s Zhongzhi Enterprise Group headline-making revelations have investors uttering global markets’ least favorite word: contagion.

A liquidity crisis at the troubled shadow bank comes just days after property development giant Country Garden missed coupon payments. Concerns surrounding Country Garden’s finances echo the China Evergrande Group default debacle of 2021.

Yet trouble in China’s US$3 trillion shadow banking sector raises the stakes considerably. The extreme opacity that pervades the industry means that neither investors nor credit rating companies know the true magnitude of leverage in the financial system.

Zhongzhi, with businesses ranging from mining to wealth management and high exposure to real estate, is a microcosm of the problem.

Its stumble has triggered broader fears of additional dominoes among Chinese conglomerates to fall. PTSD from earlier collapses of Anbang Insurance Group and HNA Group is just below the surface.

Since the end of July, Zhongrong International Trust Co, a leading company controlled by Zhongzhi, has missed dozens of payments on investment products.

It’s the latest sign of how China’s property debt woes are rippling through the economy and imperiling global markets.

“The worry is that a ‘Lehman moment’ beckons, threatening the solvency of China’s financial system,” says economist Xiaoxi Zhang at Gavekal Dragonomics.

Economist Ting Lu at Nomura Holdings adds that “markets still underestimate the aftermath of the significant collapse in China’s property sector.”

Chinese property developers are having trouble meeting their financial obligations. Photo: iStock

Concerns about Zhongzhi, which has more than 1 trillion yuan of assets under management, Zhang says, is a reminder that “debt strains from property developers and local government financing vehicles are spreading across China’s economy.”

The good news, Zhang adds, is that regulatory vigilance means a rerun of the 2008 US crisis is unlikely. The bad news is that debt strains are popping up in too many sectors for comfort.

In the case of Zhongzhi, its affiliated companies offer trust products and private “directed financing” wealth-management products to high-net-worth individuals.

These target aggressive returns — typically above 6% per year — in part by investing heavily in so-called “non-standard assets,” a residual category that spans products from trust loans to accounts receivables.

The end borrowers, Zhang explains, are often firms that can’t access traditional bank loans so they turn to these more expensive shadow-financing channels.

They include many property developers and off-balance sheet local government financing vehicles, which face serious debt problems this year.

“The elevated risk of this type of lending is reflected in returns on ‘collective’ trust products,” Zhang says, “which raise funds from more than one investor — the majority of trust products. These returns have remained elevated in recent years, even as bank lending rates and corporate bond yields have fallen.”

Goldman Sachs analyst Shuo Yang notes that “given the recent net asset value markdowns and redemptions, we expect growth in trust products to slow, which could result in tighter property financing conditions, and affect banks’ earnings and balance sheets.”

Those financing conditions are partly contingent upon the direction of central bank policies from Washington to Tokyo.

Economists at ING Bank wrote in a note to clients that “we think the Fed will indeed leave interest rates unchanged in September, but we don’t think it will carry through with that final forecast hike.” They worry that further rate hikes could heighten the chances of recession.

Yang’s Goldman colleague, chief economist Jan Hatzius, says the US Federal Reserve’s first rate cut after tightening 11 times in 17 months, will likely be in the second quarter of 2024.

By then, “we expect core personal consumption expenditure inflation to have fallen below 3% on a year-on-year basis and below 2.5% on a monthly annualized basis, and wage growth to have fallen below 4% year-on-year.”

Hatzius adds that “those thresholds for cutting align roughly with the annual forecasts in the [Fed’s] summary of economic projections and the conditions at the outset of the last cutting cycle motivated by an intent to normalize from a restrictive policy stance as inflation came down in 1995.”

In 2022, Hatzius adds, “We initially took the view that the Fed was unlikely to cut until a growth scare emerged, but we softened our stance earlier this year and have since assumed that a convincing decline in inflation would probably be enough to prompt cuts.”

The People’s Bank of China would like favor a halt in US interest rate hikes. Image: Twitter

This could relieve pressure on the People’s Bank of China to manage a widening gap between US and Chinese debt yields. In the meantime, though, analysts at Citigroup expect more trust defaults as headwinds bear down on China’s property sector. But in a recent note to clients, they stopped short at predicting of Lehman Brothers-like reckoning.

“As the problems in the property development sector are not new and have already been unfolding for several years, we think investors would have already psychologically prepared for the potential of defaults,” Citi writes.

Yet the opacity that surrounds the property sector is intensifying worries that Country Garden won’t be the last company to delay payment on private onshore bonds.

“Unlike banks, which have holding power and are able to roll over credit to wait for an eventual resolution, alternative financing channels such as trusts may default once trust investors are unwilling to roll over the products,” says analyst Katherine Lei at JPMorgan.

“The default events may lead to a chain reaction on developer financing, adding stress to privately-owned enterprise developers and their creditors,” Lei said.

The geopolitical scene is adding fresh headwinds for President Xi Jinping’s economy. Last week, US President Joe Biden banned US investors from investing in sections of China’s chips, quantum computing and artificial intelligence industries.

The step could upend efforts to lift Sino-US ties from their historic lows, adding to the reasons why investors are worried about China’s trajectory.

This latest step is “spectacularly bad timing for China,” says economist Eswar Prasad at Cornell University. It comes as confidence is “falling, growth is stalling” and China “seems to be sliding into a downward spiral” amid deflation, low growth and lack of confidence all feeding on each other, Prasad says.

Analyst Gabriel Wildau at political risk advisory Teneo notes that “the investment restrictions largely mirror export controls already in place, including those that ban exports to China of machinery and software used to produce advanced semiconductors.”

Wildau adds that “unprecedentedly tough restrictions that the US Commerce Department issued in October – soon to be expanded – already rendered new US investment in advanced Chinese semiconductor production effectively impossible, since any such factory would need imported equipment covered by those restrictions.”

All this, warns Jens Eskelund, president of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China, amounts to a “perfect storm” damaging foreign investors’ confidence in Asia’s biggest economy.

“From an FDI perspective, China is experiencing a perfect storm in which there are many factors now conspiring,” Eskelund told the South China Morning Post, referring to supply chain chaos, manufacturing disruptions, geopolitical tensions and slowing economic growth that “affect investor sentiment.”

In the second quarter of 2023, multinational companies turned “less optimistic” on China in terms of macro trends, consumption, labor and cost metrics, according to Morgan Stanley’s mainland sentiment Index.

Morgan Stanley analyst Laura Wang notes that this marks the first time since late 2021 when all four areas showed deterioration.

What’s needed, analysts say, is for Xi’s Communist Party to make good on its 2013 pledge to give market forces a “decisive” role in Beijing’s decision-making. This means, in part, taking steps to put the proverbial horse before the cart.

Over the last decade, Xi’s party tended to over-promise and under-deliver reform-wise.

Chinese President Xi Jinping on a large screen during a cultural performance as part of the celebration of the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China on June 28, 2021. Photo: Asia Times Files / AFP / Noel Celis

During the Xi era, China has opened equity markets ever wider to overseas investors. Beijing has done the same with government bonds, which are being added to a who’s-who of global indexes.

Trouble is, access to exchanges in Shanghai and Shenzhen often outpace the domestic reforms needed to ready China Inc for the global prime time.

China, as is often said, is working from its own playbook, one that even detractors grudgingly admit has a way of beating the odds. Myriad times since 1997, analysts, investors and shortsellers predicted a credit-and-debt-fueled crash that has yet to arrive.

Even so, there are certain laws of gravity that still apply to economies transitioning from state-driven and export-led growth to services, innovation and domestic consumption.

One of those laws states that developing economies should build credible and trusted markets before trillions of dollars of outside capital arrive.

This means regulators must methodically increase transparency, prod companies to raise their governance games, devise reliable surveillance mechanisms like credit rating players and strengthen the financial architecture before the world’s investors show up.

On Xi’s watch, China has become less transparent and the media less free. And this is the problem facing Xiconomics: too often China has believed it can build a world-class financial system after, not before, waves of foreign capital arrive.

Follow William Pesek on X, formerly known as Twitter, at @WilliamPesek

asiatimes.com · by William Pesek · August 18, 2023

18. How America Got Mean

For reflection.

Excerpts:

Those of us who oppose these authoritarians stand, by contrast, for a philosophy of moral realism. Yes, of course people are selfish and life can be harsh. But over the centuries, civilizations have established rules and codes to nurture cooperation, to build trust and sweeten our condition. These include personal moral codes so we know how to treat one another well, ethical codes to help prevent corruption on the job and in public life, and the rules of the liberal world order so that nations can live in peace, secure within their borders.

Moral realists are fighting to defend and modernize these rules and standards—these sinews of civilization. Moral realism is built on certain core principles. Character is destiny. We can either elect people who try to embody the highest standards of honesty, kindness, and integrity, or elect people who shred those standards. Statecraft is soulcraft. The laws we pass shape the kinds of people we become. We can structure our tax code to encourage people to be enterprising and to save more, or we can structure the code to encourage people to be conniving and profligate. Democracy is the system that best enhances human dignity. Democratic regimes entrust power to the people, and try to form people so they will be responsible with that trust. Authoritarian regimes seek to create a world in which the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

Look, I understand why people don’t want to get all moralistic in public. Many of those who do are self-righteous prigs, or rank hypocrites. And all of this is only a start. But healthy moral ecologies don’t just happen. They have to be seeded and tended by people who think and talk in moral terms, who try to model and inculcate moral behavior, who understand that we have to build moral communities because on our own, we are all selfish and flawed. Moral formation is best when it’s humble. It means giving people the skills and habits that will help them be considerate to others in the complex situations of life. It means helping people behave in ways that make other people feel included, seen, and respected. That’s very different from how we treat people now—in ways that make them feel sad and lonely, and that make them grow unkind.

How America Got Mean

In a culture devoid of moral education, generations are growing up in a morally inarticulate, self-referential world.

By David Brooks

Illustrations by Ricardo Tomás

The Atlantic · by David Brooks · August 14, 2023

Over the past eight years or so, I’ve been obsessed with two questions. The first is: Why have Americans become so sad? The rising rates of depression have been well publicized, as have the rising deaths of despair from drugs, alcohol, and suicide. But other statistics are similarly troubling. The percentage of people who say they don’t have close friends has increased fourfold since 1990. The share of Americans ages 25 to 54 who weren’t married or living with a romantic partner went up to 38 percent in 2019, from 29 percent in 1990. A record-high 25 percent of 40-year-old Americans have never married. More than half of all Americans say that no one knows them well. The percentage of high-school students who report “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness” shot up from 26 percent in 2009 to 44 percent in 2021.

Explore the September 2023 Issue

Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.

My second, related question is: Why have Americans become so mean? I was recently talking with a restaurant owner who said that he has to eject a customer from his restaurant for rude or cruel behavior once a week—something that never used to happen. A head nurse at a hospital told me that many on her staff are leaving the profession because patients have become so abusive. At the far extreme of meanness, hate crimes rose in 2020 to their highest level in 12 years. Murder rates have been surging, at least until recently. Same with gun sales. Social trust is plummeting. In 2000, two-thirds of American households gave to charity; in 2018, fewer than half did. The words that define our age reek of menace: conspiracy, polarization, mass shootings, trauma, safe spaces.

We’re enmeshed in some sort of emotional, relational, and spiritual crisis, and it undergirds our political dysfunction and the general crisis of our democracy. What is going on?

Over the past few years, different social observers have offered different stories to explain the rise of hatred, anxiety, and despair.

The technology story: Social media is driving us all crazy.

The sociology story: We’ve stopped participating in community organizations and are more isolated.

The demography story: America, long a white-dominated nation, is becoming a much more diverse country, a change that has millions of white Americans in a panic.

The economy story: High levels of economic inequality and insecurity have left people afraid, alienated, and pessimistic.

I agree, to an extent, with all of these stories, but I don’t think any of them is the deepest one. Sure, social media has bad effects, but it is everywhere around the globe—and the mental-health crisis is not. Also, the rise of despair and hatred has engulfed a lot of people who are not on social media. Economic inequality is real, but it doesn’t fully explain this level of social and emotional breakdown. The sociologists are right that we’re more isolated, but why? What values lead us to choose lifestyles that make us lonely and miserable?

The most important story about why Americans have become sad and alienated and rude, I believe, is also the simplest: We inhabit a society in which people are no longer trained in how to treat others with kindness and consideration. Our society has become one in which people feel licensed to give their selfishness free rein. The story I’m going to tell is about morals. In a healthy society, a web of institutions—families, schools, religious groups, community organizations, and workplaces—helps form people into kind and responsible citizens, the sort of people who show up for one another. We live in a society that’s terrible at moral formation.

Read: American shoppers are a nightmare

Moral formation, as I will use that stuffy-sounding term here, comprises three things. First, helping people learn to restrain their selfishness. How do we keep our evolutionarily conferred egotism under control? Second, teaching basic social and ethical skills. How do you welcome a neighbor into your community? How do you disagree with someone constructively? And third, helping people find a purpose in life. Morally formative institutions hold up a set of ideals. They provide practical pathways toward a meaningful existence: Here’s how you can dedicate your life to serving the poor, or protecting the nation, or loving your neighbor.

For a large part of its history, America was awash in morally formative institutions. Its Founding Fathers had a low view of human nature, and designed the Constitution to mitigate it (even while validating that low view of human nature by producing a document rife with racism and sexism). “Men I find to be a Sort of Beings very badly constructed,” Benjamin Franklin wrote, “as they are generally more easily provok’d than reconcil’d, more dispos’d to do Mischief to each other than to make Reparation, and much more easily deceiv’d than undeceiv’d.”

If such flawed, self-centered creatures were going to govern themselves and be decent neighbors to one another, they were going to need some training. For roughly 150 years after the founding, Americans were obsessed with moral education. In 1788, Noah Webster wrote, “The virtues of men are of more consequence to society than their abilities ; and for this reason, the heart should be cultivated with more assiduity than the head.” The progressive philosopher John Dewey wrote in 1909 that schools teach morality “every moment of the day, five days a week.” Hollis Frissell, the president of the Hampton Institute, an early school for African Americans, declared, “Character is the main object of education.” As late as 1951, a commission organized by the National Education Association, one of the main teachers’ unions, stated that “an unremitting concern for moral and spiritual values continues to be a top priority for education.”

The moral-education programs that stippled the cultural landscape during this long stretch of history came from all points on the political and religious spectrums. School textbooks such as McGuffey’s Eclectic Readers not only taught students how to read and write; they taught etiquette, and featured stories designed to illustrate right and wrong behavior. In the 1920s, W. E. B. Du Bois’s magazine for Black children, The Brownies’ Book, had a regular column called “The Judge,” which provided guidance to young readers on morals and manners. There were thriving school organizations with morally earnest names that sound quaint today—the Courtesy Club, the Thrift Club, the Knighthood of Youth.

Beyond the classroom lay a host of other groups: the YMCA; the Sunday-school movement; the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts; the settlement-house movement, which brought rich and poor together to serve the marginalized; Aldo Leopold’s land ethic, which extended our moral concerns to include proper care for the natural world; professional organizations, which enforced ethical codes; unions and workplace associations, which, in addition to enhancing worker protections and paychecks, held up certain standards of working-class respectability. And of course, by the late 19th century, many Americans were members of churches or other religious communities. Mere religious faith doesn’t always make people morally good, but living in a community, orienting your heart toward some transcendent love, basing your value system on concern for the underserved—those things tend to.

Arthur C. Brooks: Make yourself happy—be kind

An educational approach with German roots that was adopted by Scandinavian societies in the mid-to-late 19th century had a wide influence on America. It was called Bildung, roughly meaning “spiritual formation.” As conceived by Wilhelm von Humboldt, the Bildung approach gave professors complete freedom to put moral development at the center of a university’s mission. In schools across Scandinavia, students studied literature and folk cultures to identify their own emotions, wounds, and weaknesses, in order to become the complex human beings that modern society required. Schools in the Bildung tradition also aimed to clarify the individual’s responsibilities to the wider world—family, friends, nation, humanity. Start with the soul and move outward.

The Bildung movement helped inspire the Great Books programs that popped up at places like Columbia and the University of Chicago. They were based on the conviction that reading the major works of world literature and thinking about them deeply would provide the keys to living a richer life. Meanwhile, discipline in the small proprieties of daily existence—dressing formally, even just to go shopping or to a ball game—was considered evidence of uprightness: proof that you were a person who could be counted on when the large challenges came.

Much of American moral education drew on an ethos expressed by the headmaster of the Stowe School, in England, who wrote in 1930 that the purpose of his institution was to turn out young men who were “acceptable at a dance and invaluable in a shipwreck.” America’s National Institute for Moral Instruction was founded in 1911 and published a “Children’s Morality Code,” with 10 rules for right living. At the turn of the 20th century, Mount Holyoke College, an all-women’s institution, was an example of an intentionally thick moral community. When a young Frances Perkins was a student there, her Latin teacher detected a certain laziness in her. She forced Perkins to spend hours conjugating Latin verbs, to cultivate self-discipline. Perkins grew to appreciate this: “For the first time I became conscious of character.” The school also called upon women to follow morally ambitious paths. “Do what nobody else wants to do; go where nobody else wants to go,” the school’s founder implored. Holyoke launched women into lives of service in Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East. Perkins, who would become the first woman to serve in a presidential Cabinet (Franklin D. Roosevelt’s), was galvanized there.

Read: Students’ broken moral compasses

These various approaches to moral formation shared two premises. The first was that training the heart and body is more important than training the reasoning brain. Some moral skills can be taught the way academic subjects are imparted, through books and lectures. But we learn most virtues the way we learn crafts, through the repetition of many small habits and practices, all within a coherent moral culture—a community of common values, whose members aspire to earn one another’s respect.

Ricardo Tomás

The other guiding premise was that concepts like justice and right and wrong are not matters of personal taste: An objective moral order exists, and human beings are creatures who habitually sin against that order. This recognition was central, for example, to the way the civil-rights movement in the 1950s and early 1960s thought about character formation. “Instead of assured progress in wisdom and decency man faces the ever present possibility of swift relapse not merely to animalism but into such calculated cruelty as no other animal can practice,” Martin Luther King Jr. believed. Elsewhere, he wrote, “The force of sinfulness is so stubborn a characteristic of human nature that it can only be restrained when the social unit is armed with both moral and physical might.”

At their best, the civil-rights marchers in this prophetic tradition understood that they could become corrupted even while serving a noble cause. They could become self-righteous because their cause was just, hardened by hatred of their opponents, prideful as they asserted power. King’s strategy of nonviolence was an effort simultaneously to expose the sins of their oppressors and to restrain the sinful tendencies inherent in themselves. “What gave such widely compelling force to King’s leadership and oratory,” the historian George Marsden argues, “was his bedrock conviction that moral law was built into the universe.”

A couple of obvious things need to be said about this ethos of moral formation that dominated American life for so long. It prevailed alongside all sorts of hierarchies that we now rightly find abhorrent: whites superior to Blacks, men to women, Christians to Jews, straight people to gay people. And the emphasis on morality didn’t produce perfect people. Moral formation doesn’t succeed in making people angels—it tries to make them better than they otherwise might be.

Furthermore, we would never want to go back to the training methods that prevailed for so long, rooted in so many thou shall nots and so much shaming, and riddled with so much racism and sexism. Yet a wise accounting should acknowledge that emphasizing moral formation meant focusing on an important question—what is life for?—and teaching people how to bear up under inevitable difficulties. A culture invested in shaping character helped make people resilient by giving them ideals to cling to when times got hard. In some ways, the old approach to moral formation was, at least theoretically, egalitarian: If your status in the community was based on character and reputation, then a farmer could earn dignity as readily as a banker. This ethos came down hard on self-centeredness and narcissistic display. It offered practical guidance on how to be a good neighbor, a good friend.

And then it mostly went away.

The crucial pivot happened just after World War II, as people wrestled with the horrors of the 20th century. One group, personified by the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, argued that recent events had exposed the prevalence of human depravity and the dangers, in particular, of tribalism, nationalism, and collective pride. This group wanted to double down on moral formation, with a greater emphasis on humility.

Another group, personified by Carl Rogers, a founder of humanistic psychology, focused on the problem of authority. The trouble with the 20th century, the members of this group argued, was that the existence of rigid power hierarchies led to oppression in many spheres of life. We need to liberate individuals from these authority structures, many contended. People are naturally good and can be trusted to do their own self-actualization.

After decades without much in the way of moral formation, America became a place where 74 million people looked at Donald Trump’s morality and saw presidential timber.

A cluster of phenomenally successful books appeared in the decade after World War II, making the case that, as Rabbi Joshua Loth Liebman wrote in Peace of Mind (1946), “thou shalt not be afraid of thy hidden impulses.” People can trust the goodness inside. His book topped the New York Times best-seller list for 58 weeks. Dr. Spock’s first child-rearing manual was published the same year. That was followed by books like The Power of Positive Thinking (1952). According to this ethos, morality is not something that we develop in communities. It’s nurtured by connecting with our authentic self and finding our true inner voice. If people are naturally good, we don’t need moral formation; we just need to let people get in touch with themselves. Organization after organization got out of the moral-formation business and into the self-awareness business. By the mid‑1970s, for example, the Girl Scouts’ founding ethos of service to others had shifted: “How can you get more in touch with you? What are you thinking? What are you feeling?” one Girl Scout handbook asked.

Schools began to abandon moral formation in the 1940s and ’50s, as the education historian B. Edward McClellan chronicles in Moral Education in America : “By the 1960s deliberate moral education was in full-scale retreat” as educators “paid more attention to the SAT scores of their students, and middle-class parents scrambled to find schools that would give their children the best chances to qualify for elite colleges and universities.” The postwar period saw similar change at the college level, Anthony Kronman, a former dean of Yale Law School, has noted. The “research ideal” supplanted the earlier humanistic ideal of cultivating the whole student. As academics grew more specialized, Kronman has argued, the big questions—What is the meaning of life? How do you live a good life?—lost all purchase. Such questions became unprofessional for an academic to even ask.

Read: The benefits of character education

In sphere after sphere, people decided that moral reasoning was not really relevant. Psychology’s purview grew, especially in family and educational matters, its vocabulary framing “virtually all public discussion” of the moral life of children, James Davison Hunter, a prominent American scholar on character education, noted in 2000. “For decades now, contributions from philosophers and theologians have been muted or nonexistent.” Psychology is a wonderful profession, but its goal is mental health, not moral growth.

From the start, some worried about this privatizing of morality. “If what is good, what is right, what is true is only what the individual ‘chooses’ to ‘invent,’ ” Walter Lippmann wrote in his 1955 collection, Essays in the Public Philosophy, “then we are outside the traditions of civility.” His book was hooted down by establishment figures such as the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.; the de-moralization of American culture was under way.

Over the course of the 20th century, words relating to morality appeared less and less frequently in the nation’s books: According to a 2012 paper, usage of a cluster of words related to being virtuous also declined significantly. Among them were bravery (which dropped by 65 percent), gratitude (58 percent), and humbleness (55 percent). For decades, researchers have asked incoming college students about their goals in life. In 1967, about 85 percent said they were strongly motivated to develop “a meaningful philosophy of life”; by 2000, only 42 percent said that. Being financially well off became the leading life goal; by 2015, 82 percent of students said wealth was their aim.

In a culture devoid of moral education, generations grow up in a morally inarticulate, self-referential world. The Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith and a team of researchers asked young adults across the country in 2008 about their moral lives. One of their findings was that the interviewees had not given the subject of morality much thought. “I’ve never had to make a decision about what’s right and what’s wrong,” one young adult told the researchers. “My teachers avoid controversies like that like the plague,” many teenagers said.

The moral instincts that Smith observed in his sample fell into the pattern that the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre called “emotivism”: Whatever feels good to me is moral. “I would probably do what would make me happy” in any given situation, one of the interviewees declared. “Because it’s me in the long run.” As another put it, “If you’re okay with it morally, as long as you’re not getting caught, then it’s not really against your morals, is it?” Smith and his colleagues emphasized that the interviewees were not bad people but, because they were living “in morally very thin or spotty worlds,” they had never been given a moral vocabulary or learned moral skills.

Most of us who noticed the process of de-moralization as it was occurring thought a bland moral relativism and empty consumerism would be the result: You do you and I’ll do me. That’s not what happened.

“Moral communities are fragile things, hard to build and easy to destroy,” the psychologist Jonathan Haidt writes in The Righteous Mind. When you are raised in a culture without ethical structure, you become internally fragile. You have no moral compass to give you direction, no permanent ideals to which you can swear ultimate allegiance. “He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how,” the psychiatrist (and Holocaust survivor) Viktor Frankl wrote, interpreting a famous Nietzsche saying. Those without a why fall apart when the storms hit. They begin to suffer from that feeling of moral emptiness that Émile Durkheim called “anomie.”

Expecting people to build a satisfying moral and spiritual life on their own by looking within themselves is asking too much. A culture that leaves people morally naked and alone leaves them without the skills to be decent to one another. Social trust falls partly because more people are untrustworthy. That creates crowds of what psychologists call “vulnerable narcissists.” We all know grandiose narcissists—people who revere themselves as the center of the universe. Vulnerable narcissists are the more common figures in our day—people who are also addicted to thinking about themselves, but who often feel anxious, insecure, avoidant. Intensely sensitive to rejection, they scan for hints of disrespect. Their self-esteem is wildly in flux. Their uncertainty about their inner worth triggers cycles of distrust, shame, and hostility.

“The breakdown of an enduring moral framework will always produce disconnection, alienation, and an estrangement from those around you,” Luke Bretherton, a theologian at Duke Divinity School, told me. The result is the kind of sadness I see in the people around me. Young adults I know are spiraling, leaving school, moving from one mental-health facility to another. After a talk I gave in Oklahoma, a woman asked me, “What do you do when you no longer want to be alive?” The very next night I had dinner with a woman who told me that her brother had died by suicide three months before. I mentioned these events to a group of friends on a Zoom call, and nearly half of them said they’d had a brush with suicide in their family. Statistics paint the broader picture: Suicide rates have increased by more than 30 percent since 2000, according to the CDC.

Sadness, loneliness, and self-harm turn into bitterness. Social pain is ultimately a response to a sense of rejection—of being invisible, unheard, disrespected, victimized. When people feel that their identity is unrecognized, the experience registers as an injustice—because it is. People who have been treated unjustly often lash out and seek ways to humiliate those who they believe have humiliated them.

Even as our public life has grown morally bare, people yearn to feel respected and worthy of respect, need to feel that their life has some moral purpose and meaning.

Lonely eras are not just sad eras; they are violent ones. In 19th-century America, when a lot of lonely young men were crossing the western frontier, one of the things they tended to do was shoot one another. As the saying goes, pain that is not transformed gets transmitted. People grow more callous, defensive, distrustful, and hostile. The pandemic made it worse, but antisocial behavior is still high even though the lockdowns are over. And now we are caught in a cycle, ill treatment leading to humiliation and humiliation leading to more meanness. Social life becomes more barbaric, online and off.

If you put people in a moral vacuum, they will seek to fill it with the closest thing at hand. Over the past several years, people have sought to fill the moral vacuum with politics and tribalism. American society has become hyper-politicized.

David Brooks: America is having a moral convulsion

According to research by Ryan Streeter, the director of domestic-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, lonely young people are seven times more likely to say they are active in politics than young people who aren’t lonely. For people who feel disrespected, unseen, and alone, politics is a seductive form of social therapy. It offers them a comprehensible moral landscape: The line between good and evil runs not down the middle of every human heart, but between groups. Life is a struggle between us, the forces of good, and them, the forces of evil.

The Manichaean tribalism of politics appears to give people a sense of belonging. For many years, America seemed to be awash in a culture of hyper-individualism. But these days, people are quick to identify themselves by their group: Republican, Democrat, evangelical, person of color, LGBTQ, southerner, patriot, progressive, conservative. People who feel isolated and under threat flee to totalizing identities.

Politics appears to give people a sense of righteousness: A person’s moral stature is based not on their conduct, but on their location on the political spectrum. You don’t have to be good; you just have to be liberal—or you just have to be conservative. The stronger a group’s claim to victim status, the more virtuous it is assumed to be, and the more secure its members can feel about their own innocence.

Politics also provides an easy way to feel a sense of purpose. You don’t have to feed the hungry or sit with the widow to be moral; you just have to experience the right emotion. You delude yourself that you are participating in civic life by feeling properly enraged at the other side. That righteous fury rising in your gut lets you know that you are engaged in caring about this country. The culture war is a struggle that gives life meaning.

Politics overwhelms everything. Churches, universities, sports, pop culture, health care are swept up in a succession of battles that are really just one big war—red versus blue. Evangelicalism used to be a faith; today it’s primarily a political identity. College humanities departments used to study literature and history to plumb the human heart and mind; now they sometimes seem exclusively preoccupied with politics, and with the oppressive systems built around race, class, and gender. Late-night comedy shows have become political pep rallies. Hundreds of thousands of Americans died unnecessarily during the pandemic because people saw a virus through the lens of a political struggle.

This is not politics as it is normally understood. In psychically healthy societies, people fight over the politics of distribution: How high should taxes be? How much money should go to social programs for the poor and the elderly? We’ve shifted focus from the politics of redistribution to the politics of recognition. Political movements are fueled by resentment, by feelings that society does not respect or recognize me. Political and media personalities gin up dramas in which our side is emotionally validated and the other side is emotionally shamed. The person practicing the politics of recognition is not trying to get resources for himself or his constituency; he is trying to admire himself. He’s trying to use politics to fill the hole in his soul. It doesn’t work.

The politics of recognition doesn’t give you community and connection, certainly not in a system like our current one, mired in structural dysfunction. People join partisan tribes in search of belonging—but they end up in a lonely mob of isolated belligerents who merely obey the same orthodoxy.

If you are asking politics to be the reigning source of meaning in your life, you are asking more of politics than it can bear. Seeking to escape sadness, loneliness, and anomie through politics serves only to drop you into a world marked by fear and rage, by a sadistic striving for domination. Sure, you’ve left the moral vacuum—but you’ve landed in the pulverizing destructiveness of moral war. The politics of recognition has not produced a happy society. When asked by the General Social Survey to rate their happiness level, 20 percent of Americans in 2022 rated it at the lowest level—only 8 percent did the same in 1990.

Read: What the longest study on human happiness found is the key to a good life

America’s Founding Fathers studied the history of democracies going back to ancient Greece. They drew the lesson that democracies can be quite fragile. When private virtue fails, the constitutional order crumbles. After decades without much in the way of moral formation, America became a place where more than 74 million people looked at Donald Trump’s morality and saw presidential timber.

Even in dark times, sparks of renewal appear. In 2018, a documentary about Mister Rogers called Won’t You Be My Neighbor? was released. The film showed Fred Rogers in all his simple goodness—his small acts of generosity; his displays of vulnerability; his respect, even reverence, for each child he encountered. People cried openly while watching it in theaters. In an age of conflict and threat, the sight of radical goodness was so moving.

In the summer of 2020, the series Ted Lasso premiered. When Lasso describes his goals as a soccer coach, he could mention the championships he hopes to win or some other conventional metric of success, but he says, “For me, success is not about the wins and losses. It’s about helping these young fellas be the best versions of themselves on and off the field.”

That is a two-sentence description of moral formation. Ted Lasso is about an earnest, cheerful, and transparently kind man who enters a world that has grown cynical, amoral, and manipulative, and, episode after episode, even through his own troubles, he offers the people around him opportunities to grow more gracious, to confront their vulnerabilities and fears, and to treat one another more gently and wisely. Amid lockdowns and political rancor, it became a cultural touchstone, and the most watched show on Apple TV+.

Even as our public life has grown morally bare, people, as part of their elemental nature, yearn to feel respected and worthy of respect, need to feel that their life has some moral purpose and meaning. People still want to build a society in which it is easier to be good. So the questions before us are pretty simple: How can we build morally formative institutions that are right for the 21st century? What do we need to do to build a culture that helps people become the best versions of themselves?

Healthy moral ecologies don’t just happen. They have to be seeded and tended.

A few necessities come immediately to mind.

A modern vision of how to build character. The old-fashioned models of character-building were hopelessly gendered. Men were supposed to display iron willpower that would help them achieve self-mastery over their unruly passions. Women were to sequester themselves in a world of ladylike gentility in order to not be corrupted by bad influences and base desires. Those formulas are obsolete today.

The best modern approach to building character is described in Iris Murdoch’s book The Sovereignty of Good. Murdoch writes that “nothing in life is of any value except the attempt to be virtuous.” For her, moral life is not defined merely by great deeds of courage or sacrifice in epic moments. Instead, moral life is something that goes on continually—treating people considerately in the complex situations of daily existence. For her, the essential moral act is casting a “just and loving” attention on other people.

Normally, she argues, we go about our days with self-centered, self-serving eyes. We see and judge people in ways that satisfy our own ego. We diminish and stereotype and ignore, reducing other people to bit players in our own all-consuming personal drama. But we become morally better, she continues, as we learn to see others deeply, as we learn to envelop others in the kind of patient, caring regard that makes them feel seen, heard, and understood. This is the kind of attention that implicitly asks, “What are you going through?” and cares about the answer.

I become a better person as I become more curious about those around me, as I become more skilled in seeing from their point of view. As I learn to perceive you with a patient and loving regard, I will tend to treat you well. We can, Murdoch concluded, “grow by looking.”

Mandatory social-skills courses. Murdoch’s character-building formula roots us in the simple act of paying attention: Do I attend to you well? It also emphasizes that character is formed and displayed as we treat others considerately. This requires not just a good heart, but good social skills: how to listen well. How to disagree with respect. How to ask for and offer forgiveness. How to patiently cultivate a friendship. How to sit with someone who is grieving or depressed. How to be a good conversationalist.

These are some of the most important skills a person can have. And yet somehow, we don’t teach them. Our schools spend years prepping students with professional skills—but offer little guidance on how to be an upstanding person in everyday life. If we’re going to build a decent society, elementary schools and high schools should require students to take courses that teach these specific social skills, and thus prepare them for life with one another. We could have courses in how to be a good listener or how to build a friendship. The late feminist philosopher Nel Noddings developed a whole pedagogy around how to effectively care for others.

A new core curriculum. More and more colleges and universities are offering courses in what you might call “How to Live.” Yale has one called “Life Worth Living.” Notre Dame has one called “God and the Good Life.” A first-year honors program in this vein at Valparaiso University, in Indiana, involves not just conducting formal debates on ideas gleaned from the Great Books, but putting on a musical production based on their themes. Many of these courses don’t give students a ready-made formula, but they introduce students to some of the venerated moral traditions—Buddhism, Judeo-Christianity, and Enlightenment rationalism, among others. They introduce students to those thinkers who have thought hard on moral problems, from Aristotle to Desmond Tutu to Martha Nussbaum. They hold up diverse exemplars to serve as models of how to live well. They put the big questions of life firmly on the table: What is the ruling passion of your soul? Whom are you responsible to? What are my moral obligations? What will it take for my life to be meaningful? What does it mean to be a good human in today’s world? What are the central issues we need to engage with concerning new technology and human life?

These questions clash with the ethos of the modern university, which is built around specialization and passing on professional or technical knowledge. But they are the most important courses a college can offer. They shouldn’t be on the margins of academic life. They should be part of the required core curriculum.

Intergenerational service. We spend most of our lives living by the logic of the meritocracy: Life is an individual climb upward toward success. It’s about pursuing self-interest.

There should be at least two periods of life when people have a chance to take a sabbatical from the meritocracy and live by an alternative logic—the logic of service: You have to give to receive. You have to lose yourself in a common cause to find yourself. The deepest human relationships are gift relationships, based on mutual care. (An obvious model for at least some aspects of this is the culture of the U.S. military, which similarly emphasizes honor, service, selflessness, and character in support of a purpose greater than oneself, throwing together Americans of different ages and backgrounds who forge strong social bonds.)

Those sabbaticals could happen at the end of the school years and at the end of the working years. National service programs could bring younger and older people together to work to address community needs.

These programs would allow people to experience other-centered ways of being and develop practical moral habits: how to cooperate with people unlike you. How to show up day after day when progress is slow. How to do work that is generous and hard.

Moral organizations. Most organizations serve two sets of goals—moral goals and instrumental goals. Hospitals heal the sick and also seek to make money. Newspapers and magazines inform the public and also try to generate clicks. Law firms defend clients and also try to maximize billable hours. Nonprofits aim to serve the public good and also raise money.

In our society, the commercial or utilitarian goals tend to eclipse the moral goals. Doctors are pressured by hospital administrators to rush through patients so they can charge more fees. Journalists are incentivized to write stories that confirm reader prejudices in order to climb the most-read lists. Whole companies slip into an optimization mindset, in which everything is done to increase output and efficiency.

Moral renewal won’t come until we have leaders who are explicit, loud, and credible about both sets of goals. Here’s how we’re growing financially, but also Here’s how we’re learning to treat one another with consideration and respect; here’s how we’re going to forgo some financial returns in order to better serve our higher mission.

Early in my career, as a TV pundit at PBS NewsHour, I worked with its host, Jim Lehrer. Every day, with a series of small gestures, he signaled what kind of behavior was valued there and what kind of behavior was unacceptable. In this subtle way, he established a set of norms and practices that still lives on. He and others built a thick and coherent moral ecology, and its way of being was internalized by most of the people who have worked there.

Politics as a moral enterprise. An ancient brand of amoralism now haunts the world. Authoritarian-style leaders like Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Xi Jinping embody a kind of amoral realism. They evince a mindset that assumes that the world is a vicious, dog-eat-dog sort of place. Life is a competition to grab what you can. Force is what matters. Morality is a luxury we cannot afford, or merely a sham that elites use to mask their own lust for power. It’s fine to elect people who lie, who are corrupt, as long as they are ruthless bastards for our side. The ends justify the means.

Those of us who oppose these authoritarians stand, by contrast, for a philosophy of moral realism. Yes, of course people are selfish and life can be harsh. But over the centuries, civilizations have established rules and codes to nurture cooperation, to build trust and sweeten our condition. These include personal moral codes so we know how to treat one another well, ethical codes to help prevent corruption on the job and in public life, and the rules of the liberal world order so that nations can live in peace, secure within their borders.

Moral realists are fighting to defend and modernize these rules and standards—these sinews of civilization. Moral realism is built on certain core principles. Character is destiny. We can either elect people who try to embody the highest standards of honesty, kindness, and integrity, or elect people who shred those standards. Statecraft is soulcraft. The laws we pass shape the kinds of people we become. We can structure our tax code to encourage people to be enterprising and to save more, or we can structure the code to encourage people to be conniving and profligate. Democracy is the system that best enhances human dignity. Democratic regimes entrust power to the people, and try to form people so they will be responsible with that trust. Authoritarian regimes seek to create a world in which the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

Look, I understand why people don’t want to get all moralistic in public. Many of those who do are self-righteous prigs, or rank hypocrites. And all of this is only a start. But healthy moral ecologies don’t just happen. They have to be seeded and tended by people who think and talk in moral terms, who try to model and inculcate moral behavior, who understand that we have to build moral communities because on our own, we are all selfish and flawed. Moral formation is best when it’s humble. It means giving people the skills and habits that will help them be considerate to others in the complex situations of life. It means helping people behave in ways that make other people feel included, seen, and respected. That’s very different from how we treat people now—in ways that make them feel sad and lonely, and that make them grow unkind.

This article appears in the September 2023 print edition with the headline “How America Got Mean.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

The Atlantic · by David Brooks · August 14, 2023

19. Political Warfare Comes Home

I offer this with some trepidation because I do not want to delve into partisan issues. One reason for submitting this is to note the different uses of political warfare. We have the George Kennan and Paul Smith definitions of political warfare which apply internationally and the political warfare among nation-states and non-state actors. Then we have domestic political warfare. I of course emphasize the former in my views and writings but frankly most people associate political warfare with domestic politics, especially with the divides we have today.

Second, any discussion of the constitution and the peaceful transfer of power under our constitution must be thoughtfully considered despite the partisanship that is bringing on such threats.

China, Russia, Iran, and north Korea are conducting political warfare against us. We do not need to be conducting political warfare against ourselves.

George F. Kennan defined political warfare as “the logical application of Clausewitz’s doctrine in time of peace.” While stopping short of the direct kinetic confrontation between two countries’ armed forces, “political warfare is the employment of all the means at a nation's command… to achieve its national objectives.” A country embracing Political Warfare conducts “both overt and covert” operations in the absence of declared war or overt force-on-force hostilities. Efforts “range from such overt actions as political alliances, economic measures…, and ‘white’ propaganda to such covert operations as clandestine support of ‘friendly’ foreign elements, ‘black’ psychological warfare and even encouragement of underground resistance in hostile states.” See George Kennan, "Policy Planning Memorandum." May 4, 1948.

http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/history/johnson/65ciafounding3.htm

Paul Smith defines political warfare as the use of political means to compel an opponent to do one's will, based on hostile intent. The term political describes the calculated interaction between a government and a target audience to include another state's government, military, and/or general population. Governments use a variety of techniques to coerce certain actions, thereby gaining relative advantage over an opponent. The techniques include propaganda and psychological operations (PSYOP), which service national and military objectives respectively. Propaganda has many aspects and a hostile and coercive political purpose. Psychological operations are for strategic and tactical military objectives and may be intended for hostile military and civilian populations. Smith, Paul A., On Political War (Washington: National Defense University Press, 1989)

https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a233501.pdf

Political Warfare Comes Home

After Trump’s Indictments, Can America Protect the Peaceful Transfer of Power?

By Tim Naftali

August 18, 2023

Foreign Affairs · by Tim Naftali · August 18, 2023

“The game of politics is not a branch of the Sunday school business.” Such was the characterization of “Blind Boss” Buckley, the head of the Democratic political machine in San Francisco at the dawn of the twentieth century. American politics have long had the reputation of being ruthless, but until now, they had never involved a conspiracy directed from the White House to overturn the results of a presidential election. As the two latest indictments of former President Donald Trump illustrate, something qualitatively different happened in the aftermath of his 2020 electoral loss.

Trump now faces four criminal indictments encompassing 91 criminal charges across four jurisdictions. But it is the two most recent indictments that address his attempts to steal the 2020 election and thereby attack the heart of American democracy. On August 1, a federal grand jury indicted Trump on four charges, including conspiracy to defraud the United States and conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding. That 45-page indictment makes for chilling reading as it details how Trump and his alleged co-conspirators tried to overturn the election results in the months leading up to the January 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol. Part of the conspiracy documented in the indictment included a pressure campaign on state election officials to change the results in their states. Trump’s efforts in Georgia are now the basis of a new indictment from a grand jury in Atlanta, where Trump faces 13 felony charges. That sweeping indictment also charges 18 co-defendants, including Rudolph Giuliani, the former New York mayor who joined Trump’s legal team, and Mark Meadows, a former Republican congressman who served as Trump’s White House chief of staff.

World history overflows with examples of rulers who refused to relinquish power when they lost the mandate of the people. Many Americans and foreign admirers of the United States, however, assumed that the country was somehow immune from a problem that many associated instead with the developing world. This belief stemmed from a longstanding faith in “American exceptionalism,” the idea that the U.S. political system and American values are unique and a model for everyone else to follow. But after his 2020 election loss, Trump chose to test the democratic norm of a peaceful transition. Now, these indictments and the trials that will likely follow will test presidential accountability as nothing has before.

HISTORY HAS ITS EYES ON YOU

The 2020 election was not the first fraught presidential transition in the United States. In March 1861, with seven states already having seceded, the outgoing administration of President James Buchanan ordered the U.S. military to patrol the nation’s capital to prevent secessionists from killing Abraham Lincoln, then the president-elect. But perhaps the most controversial transition occurred 15 years later, this time the product of the uneasy peace that had followed the Civil War. The 1876 election pitted Samuel Tilden, a Democrat, against the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes. Both Democrats and Republicans interfered in the vote count. Democratic elites in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina used intimidation to prevent newly enfranchised Black voters from casting their ballots. In response to the efforts of white supremacists in these states, all of which were still under U.S. Army occupation, Republican state officials threw out legitimate Democratic votes. In the midst of this turmoil, four states sent rival slates of electors to the U.S. Congress. Paralyzed, Congress passed the 1877 Electoral Commission Act, which established a commission to sort things out. The actual victor of the election remained in dispute until just days before the inauguration, when allies of Hayes promised that in return for accepting a Republican in the White House, Democrats would be compensated with the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the South, effectively leaving formerly enslaved people at the mercy of their former enslavers for another 90 years.

After nearly 125 years of relatively smooth transfers of power came the 2000 election, which hung in the balance for weeks because of the close count in Florida. The suspense lasted until a month before the swearing-in of President George W. Bush. Although the Supreme Court’s decision to intervene to prevent the recounts in Florida from continuing was narrowly argued and widely criticized, the loser, Vice President Al Gore, who had won the national popular vote, accepted the outcome, and his supporters melted away without incident.

A number of American presidents have refused to attend the swearing-in of their successors. John Adams, John Quincy Adams, and Andrew Johnson all declined to show up, mainly because these one-term presidents personally disliked the men who had defeated them. But until Trump, no president in the United States’ history had attempted to prevent a transfer of power after the votes were counted.

For many, this long history seemed to set the United States apart from other countries. The United States was the first country in the modern era to have an elected head of state, although that leader was to be chosen by a college of electors from each state not by the people directly. For roughly the first 40 years of the American presidency, most state legislatures selected their presidential electors, but after 1877 it would become common practice to choose them exclusively on the basis of the popular vote for president in each state. Today, all 50 states and the District of Columbia rely on the popular vote to certify presidential electors, with it being winner takes all in every state but Maine and Nebraska (where the electors are determined by the vote in each congressional district), turning the eighteenth-century electoral college into a ceremonial relic. After the 2020 election, however, some desperate Americans saw this fusty institution as an opportunity not only to make mischief but also to subvert democracy.

“WE DON’T HAVE THE EVIDENCE”

The election-related indictment brought by the U.S. Department of Justice in early August marks the first time the federal government has charged a former president for acts committed while he was president. But the real significance of the case and of the new indictment in Georgia lies in the nature of the alleged crimes. The charges against Trump raise questions not only about the line between the politically ruthless and the criminal in a democracy but also about the very ability of the judiciary, along with state and local officials, to enforce the will of the electorate against the immense power of the American presidency.

The federal indictment tells the big-picture story of the Trump team’s multipronged approach to overturn the election results. Just days after the election, Trump’s campaign team explained to the president that if he lost Arizona, Georgia, or Wisconsin, whose votes had still not been certified, he would lose the election. A week later, on November 13, Trump’s lawyers conceded in court that he had lost the popular vote in Arizona. Members of Trump’s campaign understood that the president had not been reelected. But instead of accepting the hard truth of his loss, Trump chose to start colluding with Giuliani and others to fight back.

The first point of attack was Arizona, where Trump and Giuliani are said to have called the Republican speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives, Russell “Rusty” Bowers, to insist that the Arizona government reverse its determination that Biden had won based on allegations of fraud. When Bowers subsequently asked Giuliani to share these apparent facts, Giuliani replied, “We don’t have the evidence, but we have lots of theories.” When Arizona attempted to shut the door on them, the conspirators focused on Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Georgia, prosecutors say, with Trump privately pressuring some key Republican lawmakers in those states while publicly asserting the existence of election fraud that he, like Giuliani, knew did not exist.

In Georgia, Trump didn’t merely pressure state officials; he threatened at least one of them, and in a Nixonian twist, was caught doing so on tape. On December 8, 2020, Trump called Chris Carr, Georgia’s attorney general, to get him to sign onto a lawsuit alleging fraud in multiple states with the goal of overturning the election through the U.S. Supreme Court. Explaining that there was no legitimate evidence of fraud in the Georgia count, Carr turned the president down. On January 2, Trump made his notorious call to Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, asking him to alter Georgia’s popular vote figures. When Raffensperger refused, Trump threatened him, saying that by not reporting the supposed fraud, he was violating the law. “You can’t let that happen,” Trump said. “That’s a big risk to you and to Ryan [Germany], your lawyer.” This call, which was recorded, would become the basis for Georgia’s charging both Trump and Meadows with unlawfully soliciting Raffensperger “to engage in conduct constituting the felony offense of Violation of Oath by Public Officer.”

Trump chose to test the democratic norm of a peaceful transition.

With the effort to badger and threaten state officials failing, the conspiracy opened a new front. In early December, Trump and his closest allies unveiled an approach that mirrored a hazy understanding of how Hayes had ultimately won the contested election of 1876. Trump and Giuliani found allies in Congress, including the Republican Senators Ted Cruz and Tommy Tuberville, to help invent and promote a fake controversy about the legitimacy of Biden’s electors in seven states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Individuals were recruited to pose as electors in those states even though those states had already selected legitimate electors to the electoral college, based upon the election results certified by each individual governor. The fake Trump electors were instructed to vote for Trump on December 14, the day that all of the legitimate electors were to cast their votes for president. As a result, there would be two sets of electoral votes in those seven states. The ultimate goal for Trump, his team, and their Republican allies in Congress was to create a situation in which Congress would be unable to decide which slates of electors were valid. This crisis would lead to Congress’s having to pause its certification of the election on January 6, similar to what happened after the election of 1876. Congress could then create an election commission to find a way out of the mess that would somehow lead to Trump staying in office. The difference was that in 1876, there had been a real impasse. Of course, any electoral impasse in 2021 would be fake news, the product of coordinated intrigue. An email message from Kenneth Chesebro, a lawyer who allegedly helped develop the fake electors scheme, to an organizer of the fake electors in Nevada, spells this out: “the purpose of having the electoral votes sent in to Congress is to provide the opportunity to debate the election irregularities in Congress, and to keep alive the possibility that the votes could be flipped to Trump.”

Some of the fake electors sensed that something was wrong. The Trump supporters chosen in Pennsylvania to sign fake certifications as electors requested assurances in a conference call with Giuliani and other co-conspirators on December 12 that their votes would only be submitted to Congress if a court found that fraud had indeed occurred in their state. Despite giving these assurances to those electors, the conspirators had no intention of waiting for a court to act in their favor. The Trump campaign would lose every one of its lawsuits. Trump pushed forward anyway, including with the effort to advance fake electoral votes from Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, the president’s senior campaign advisers refused to support the plan. The federal indictment quotes an unnamed Trump deputy campaign manager as terming it “a crazy scheme” and another unnamed senior adviser characterizing it as “certifying illegal votes.” Lacking support from campaign professionals, Trump relied on outside conspirators to make his plan happen.

For the elector scheme to work, the conspiracy still needed some patina of legitimacy for Trump’s charges of fraud. Since no U.S. court would certify that fraud had occurred, the conspirators looked for another source of legitimacy. After the fake electors cast their fake ballots on December 14, Trump tried to get his own Justice Department to find that fraud had occurred in the presidential contests in these seven states. But senior leaders at the Justice Department would not sign a determination that electoral fraud had occurred. “Just say that the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen,” Trump is quoted as repeatedly imploring Jeffrey Rosen, the acting U.S. attorney general. When Rosen and his deputy wouldn’t budge, Trump threatened both men with dismissal. Trump told his White House team that Rosen would be replaced. And Rosen would likely have been fired and the determination signed, but for the fact that Trump was warned that there would be a mass resignation at the Justice Department if Trump forced Rosen out.

Trump’s schemes to stay in office did not fail because he lost heart or changed his mind.

Facing a mutiny at the Department of Justice, Trump focused on Pence. The idea was for Pence to throw out Biden electors from the seven states and accept the fake electors or at least kick the issue back to the states. At the end of December, Trump falsely told Pence, who had not been involved in the meetings with Rosen, that the Justice Department was “finding major infractions,” the indictment states. On January 1, frustrated that Pence was reluctant to take part in the fake electors conspiracy, Trump exploded at him, “You’re too honest.” With Pence refusing to comply, Trump had his campaign issue a public statement on the night of January 5 designed to intimidate him: “The Vice President and I are in total agreement that the Vice President has the power to act.”

On the morning of January 6, Trump still hoped Pence’s opposition to committing fraud would collapse under pressure. But when the president’s representatives tried to deliver the fake electoral ballots to Pence, the vice president’s team refused to accept them. Just before heading out to give his fateful speech at the Ellipse near the White House, Trump called Pence again, trying to get him to change his mind. Witnesses to the call remember Trump calling Pence a “wimp” and telling him he wasn’t “tough enough.” Later that morning, Trump told the crowd gathered at the Ellipse, “If Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election.” In the afternoon, with rioters breaking into the Capitol, Trump tweeted, “Mike Pence didn't have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution.”

Despite the insurrection that unfolded for all to see—an attack that resulted in at least seven deaths, many injuries, and damage to the Capitol—Trump and Giuliani continued their efforts to prevent the count through the end of that day. With Pence no longer an option, they tried to call Republican senators friendly to Trump. The calls were not returned, and the conspiracy collapsed.

THIS TIME IS DIFFERENT

What Trump and his co-conspirators undertook was nothing less than a form of political warfare, traditionally associated with covert operations. Since World War II, American presidents have relied on these tactics to manipulate some democratic contests abroad, as Harry Truman did in Italy in 1948, for example, and John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson did in advance of 1964 elections in British Guiana and Chile.

For the first time, however, a U.S. president tried to overturn an election at home. In attempting to manipulate the outcome of the 2020 election, Trump went much further than even Richard Nixon, arguably the most paranoid U.S. president, whose allies worked to reverse what they saw as a stolen election in 1960. To prove that the Kennedy campaign had engaged in sufficient fraud to win the close election, allies of Nixon, as documented by the historian David Greenberg, questioned the results in 11 states. The focus of Nixon’s “recount committee” was Chicago’s Cook County, the stronghold of Mayor Richard Daley, a Democrat, who was thought to have thrown the state’s 27 electoral votes to Kennedy. The recount in Chicago didn’t find any fraud, although it did turn up 943 additional votes for Nixon. These votes were not enough, however, to overcome Kennedy’s 4,500-vote lead. Unwilling to give up, Nixon’s allies then petitioned Illinois’s Republican-dominated Board of Elections to accept a rival slate of pro-Nixon electors. When the board refused to certify those electors, the effort stopped. If anyone thought to create a parallel slate of false electors from Illinois, Nixon and his close advisers rejected the idea.

Trump’s successive schemes to stay in office did not fail because the president lost heart or changed his mind. They failed because federal officials and state leaders outside the conspiracy stopped them. Tragically, the one thing they could not stop was the violence on January 6. When historians review the extraordinary events of 2020 and 2021, they will note the public-spiritedness of Republican lawmakers in many of the states targeted by the president and his alleged co-conspirators. Officials in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin not only complicated the president’s plans but also proved fatal to them.

The two indictments this month, one federal and one state, have built upon the courage of individuals like Bowers, Carr, Raffensperger, and Georgia’s governor, Brian Kemp, to shore up the surprisingly fragile pillars of American democracy. Americans as well as the world will be watching what comes next—the pleas, the evidence, the defense, the verdicts—to see whether these judicial actions will inspire more public-spiritedness and less conspiracy should 2024 be, in any way, a close election.

TIM NAFTALI is a Senior Research Scholar at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. He was the founding Director of the federal Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum.

Foreign Affairs · by Tim Naftali · August 18, 2023

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

18.

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

If you do not read anything else in the 2017 National Security Strategy read this on page 14:

"A democracy is only as resilient as its people. An informed and engaged citizenry is the fundamental requirement for a free and resilient nation. For generations, our society has protected free press, free speech, and free thought. Today, actors such as Russia are using information tools in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of democracies. Adversaries target media, political processes, financial networks, and personal data. The American public and private sectors must recognize this and work together to defend our way of life. No external threat can be allowed to shake our shared commitment to our values, undermine our system of government, or divide our Nation."

Access NSS HERE

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