Quotes of the Day:
"The ancient Romans built elaborate networks of pipes to deliver water where they wanted it to go. The networks were a marvel. But many of the pipes were made of lead, and the water carried the lead along with it. One school of thought regards this as part of the reason for the decline and fall of Rome: lead poisoning gradually took its toll, impairing the thought and judgment of many Romans, especially at the top. The theory is much disputed; perhaps it contains no truth. But as a metaphor it is irresistible. We have built networks for the delivery of information—the internet, and especially social media. These networks, too, are a marvel. But they also carry a kind of poison with them. The mind fed from those sources learns to subsist happily on quick reactions, easy certainties, one-liners, and rage. It craves confirmation and resents contradiction. Attention spans collapse; imbecility propagates, then seems normal, then is celebrated. The capacity for rational discourse between people who disagree gradually rots. I have a good deal more confidence in the lead-pipe theory of the internet, and its effect on our culture, than in the lead-pipe theory of the fall of Rome."
- Ward Farnsworth
"When plunder becomes a way of life, men create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it."
- Frederic Bastiat
One of the great attractions of patriotism - it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what's more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous.
- Aldous Huxley
1. Putin is delaying the National Security Strategy
2. A retired Marine 3-star general explains 'critical military theory'
3. Opinion | Biden doesn’t want to change China. He wants to beat it.
4. ‘From the White House down,’ pleas for help disrupted Afghan evacuation, top U.S. commander says
5. U.S. Military Offers New Details on Raid That Led to Death of ISIS Leader
6. The Army Vet Who Was Prepping Civilians for a 'Pending' Civil War
7. TikTok shares your data more than any other social media app — and it's unclear where it goes, study says
8. Is the U.S. Army Preparing to Fight Americans?
9. Russia could again invade Ukraine during Olympics, Blinken says
10. Quad ministers address Indo-Pacific 'coercion', climate, COVID
11. ("pre-Quad Statement") Secretary Antony J. Blinken And Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne, Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, And Japanese Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi Before Their Meeting
12. A Rival of America’s Making? The Debate Over Washington’s China Strategy
13. ‘I really don’t want to be the last African-American secretary of defense’
14. Top civilian leader shares 6 objectives for the Army in 2022 and beyond
15. Why American Lost the War in Afghanistan by Robert Bruce Adolph
16. Was your T-shirt made using forced labor? A new U.S. law takes aim at ‘made in Xinjiang’
17. Air Force commando course to be overseen by someone who hasn’t gone through it
18. Elemental Strategy - Countering the Chinese Communist Party’s Efforts to Dominate the Rare Earth Industry
19. FDD Announces New Class For Its 2022 National Security Fellows Program
20. Biden Pays Army Salaries to Iranian Ally
21. As Other Hot Spots Boil, U.S. Shows Its Foreign Policy Focus Is Asia
22. Ukrainian Civilians Don’t Want War But Are Ready to Fight
23. As the Olympics heat up, China clamps down on dissent
24. Senators: CIA has secret program that collects American data
25. U.S. intelligence report details 'indirect' Russian government support for Western neofascist groups
26. How Far-Right Terrorists Choose Their Enemies
27. Congress Proposes $500 Million for Negative News Coverage of China
28. Facebook Has a Superuser-Supremacy Problem
29. The U.S. Should Want a Cold War With China
30. The Canadian trucker spectacle is an American export
1. Putin is delaying the National Security Strategy
And is there any impact on the National Defense Strategy that is currently being staffed as I understand it?
Putin is delaying the National Security Strategy
Politico · by Nahal Toosi · February 10, 2022
With help from Daniel Lippman
Russian President VLADIMIR PUTIN’s threat to Ukraine is scuttling the Biden administration’s hopes of soon releasing a National Security Strategy, NatSec Daily has learned.
The legally required document could change significantly depending on whether and how the Russian leader invades Ukraine. But overall, President JOE BIDEN and his aides are unlikely to change their core assertion that China, not Russia, is the greater long-term threat to America.
The law requires that presidents submit a National Security Strategy annually, but administrations often fail to meet that standard, and the Biden team did not deliver one last year despite many in the foreign policy world thinking that it would. Those expectations then changed to the first quarter of 2022. A senior official said today that the administration believes it will meet its “anticipated release date” but would not say what that date was.
A person familiar with the issue confirmed that Russia’s unclear plan for Ukraine is one factor affecting the timing. Practically speaking, the specifics of a Putin invasion of Ukraine — such as the form that it takes, not to mention how much ground it covers — could dramatically shape how the United States details and prioritizes the Russian threat in the strategy document. That’s especially true if Putin uses a hybrid model that includes cyber attacks.
The administration, then, could find itself in a holding pattern until Putin moves. “Awkward,” one senior U.S. administration official said.
The Atlantic Council’s BARRY PAVEL, a key contributor to the 2010 NSS while serving on the National Security Council, said delaying the document’s release is “a wise move.”
“This could be a major change to the security environment. Why would you put out a NSS when one of its core assumptions might be violated or shaken, which would cause a reassessment of the strategy?” he told NatSec Daily.
The uncertainty about the strategy’s release comes as the pen moves from one staffer to another. On Wednesday, SASHA BAKER, the document’s principal writer, was confirmed by the Senate as deputy undersecretary of defense for policy. With Baker heading to the Pentagon, REBECCA LISSNER will take over her duties with the title of acting senior director for strategic planning, NSC spokesperson EMILY HORNE confirmed. Lissner has been a director of strategic planning working with Baker for the past year.
Last March, the Biden administration released an interim strategy document — an unprecedented move — that laid out many of its foreign policy priorities. Russia was mentioned a few times, including as a “destabilizing” force. It was China, however, that earned more mentions and was described as “the only competitor potentially capable of combining its economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to mount a sustained challenge to a stable and open international system.”
ANDREA KENDALL-TAYLOR, a former U.S. intelligence official with expertise on Russia and authoritarianism, hopes the Biden team has lost any illusions that it could simply brush the Kremlin aside or even just manage it without too much hassle.
She said Russia-related changes to Biden’s NSS shouldn’t be merely cosmetic because the Ukraine crisis is “an important turning point in Russian-U.S. relations.” That’s the case even if Putin doesn’t stage an all-out invasion, she said. If he does, it’s entirely possible there will be internal U.S. government competition over an allocation of resources for how to respond, she said.
At the moment, Putin seems unlikely to walk back his threats, Kendall-Taylor said, adding, “I think he’s ready to break things.”
2. A retired Marine 3-star general explains 'critical military theory'
I believe that Lt Gen Newbold is the only senior officer to resign over the decision to attack Iraq in 2003. Some wise words to reflect on. But a lot of ideas to debate.
CMT (Critical military theory)
A retired Marine 3-star general explains 'critical military theory'
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Many Americans, particularly our most senior politicians and military leaders, seem to have developed a form of dementia when it comes to warfare. The result is confusion or denial about the essential ingredients of a competent military force, and the costs of major power conflict. The memory loss is largely irrespective of political bent because all too many are seduced by a Hollywood infused sense of antiseptic warfare and push-button solutions, while forgotten are the one million casualties of the Battle of the Somme in World War I, or the almost two million in the Battle of Stalingrad in World War II.
This “warfare dementia” is a dangerous and potentially catastrophic malady, because the price for it could alter the success of the American experiment and most assuredly will be paid in blood. The condition is exacerbated and enabled when the most senior military leaders — those who ought to know better — defer to the idealistic judgments of those whose credentials are either nonexistent or formed entirely by ideology.
The purpose of this essay is to explain the fundamental tenets of a military that will either deter potential enemies or decisively win the nation’s wars, thereby preserving our way of life. What follows are the tenets of Critical Military Theory:
1. The U.S. military has two main purposes — to deter our enemies from engaging us in warfare, and if that fails, to defeat them in combat. Deterrence is only possible if the opposing force believes it will be defeated. Respect is not good enough; fear and certainty are required.
- Relevant Wisdom: “If we desire to avoid insult, we must be able to repel it; if we desire to secure peace, one of the most powerful instruments of our rising prosperity, it must be known that we are at all times ready for War.” George Washington
2. To be true to its purpose, the U.S. military cannot be a mirror image of the society it serves. Values that are admirable in civilian society — sensitivity, individuality, compassion, and tolerance for the less capable — are often antithetical to the traits that deter a potential enemy and win the wars that must be fought: Conformity, discipline, unity.
Direct ground combat, of the type we must be prepared to fight, is only waged competently when actions are instinctive, almost irrationally disciplined, and wholly sacrificial when required. Consensus building, deference, and (frankly) softness have their place in polite society, but nothing about intense ground combat is polite — it is often sub-humanly coarse.
- Relevant Wisdom: “We sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to do violence on those who would harm us.” George Orwell
3. There is only one overriding standard for military capability: lethality. Those officeholders who dilute this core truth with civil society’s often appropriate priorities (diversity, gender focus, etc.) undermine the military’s chances of success in combat. Reduced chances for success mean more casualties, which makes defeat more likely. Combat is the harshest meritocracy that exists, and nothing but ruthless adherence to this principle contributes to deterrence and combat effectiveness.
- Relevant Wisdom: “I shall see no officer under my command is debarred….from attending to his first duty, which is and always has been to train the private men under his command that they may without question beat any force opposed to them in the field.” The Duke of Wellington
4. A military should not be designed to win but to overwhelm. In baseball, you win if your total score is one run better than your opponent’s. In war, narrow victories incur what we call “the butcher’s bill.”
- Relevant Wisdom: “To introduce into the philosophy of war the principle of moderation would be an absurdity. War is an act of violence carried to its utmost bounds.” Carl Von Clausewitz.
5. Wars must be waged only with stone-cold pragmatism, not idealism, and fought only when critical national interests are at stake. Hopes for changing cultures to fit our model are both elitist and naive. The failures of our campaigns in Iraq and especially in Afghanistan confirm this.
- Relevant Wisdom. “They enjoy playing poker with someone else’s chips.” B.V. Taylor
6. A military force’s greatest strengths are cohesion and discipline. Individuality or group identity is corrosive and a centrifugal force. Indeed, the military wears uniforms because uniformity is essential. The tenets of Critical Race Theory – a cross-disciplinary intellectual and social movement that seeks to examine the intersection of race and law in the United States, but which has the unfortunate effect of dividing people along racial lines – undermine our military’s unity and diminish our warfighting capabilities.
Recruit training teaches close order drill and the manual of arms (drill with weapons) not because they still have relevance to maneuvers on the field of battle, but because they instill a sense of how conformity creates efficiency and superior group results. Upon a firm foundation of cohesion, imaginative leaders can spark initiative and innovation. But when we highlight differences or group identity, we undermine cohesion and morale. Failure results.
- Relevant Wisdom: “Four brave men who do not know each other will not dare to attack a lion. Four less brave, but knowing each other well, sure of their reliability and consequently of mutual aid, will attack resolutely. There is the science of the organization of armies in a nutshell.” Colonel Ardant du Picq.
7. “The enemy gets a vote.” An objective lens for military theory is how the nation’s foes regard our martial ethos; after all, that is what constitutes deterrence…or lack of it. Ferocity, not sensitivity, prevails.
- Relevant Wisdom: “We will not fight them. They are not normal. When we shoot at them, they run towards us. If we fight them, we die. They are worse than the sons of Satan.” Taliban radio intercept after engaging U.S. forces.
8. Infantry and special operations forces are different. The mission of those who engage in direct ground combat is manifestly distinct, and their standards and requirements must be as well. Not necessarily better, but different. For direct ground combat units, only the highest levels of discipline, fitness, cohesion, esprit, and just plain grit are acceptable. Insist on making their conditions and standards conform to other military communities, and you weaken the temper of steel in these modern-day Spartans.
- Relevant Wisdom: “It is his back which sustains the heaviest burden; his body which suffers the greatest hardship, and his life which is suspended by the most tenuous thread.” Captain Adolf Von Schell
9. Those who enlist in our military swear an oath to carry out dangerous, sometimes fatal duties. We call it “being in the service,” because it’s service to others….selfless sacrifices when the other option was often more comfort, freedom, individuality, and higher pay. Those who occupy the most senior ranks of the military must repay this selflessness with courage that is even rarer — moral courage. Civilian control of the military is indisputable, but its corollary is the ordinary principle that advice is sought, offered, and seriously considered before crucial decisions are made. My personal experience provides examples — the willful exclusion of military judgments in the build-up to the Iraq War with the attendant consequence that the invasion force was too shallow (thereby creating a vacuum which the insurgents quickly filled), and the decision to disband the Iraqi Army (the single most unifying institution in that country) after the collapse of the Baathist regime. A more recent example worth considering involves the Afghanistan withdrawal.
- Relevant Wisdom: “There’s a great deal of talk about loyalty from the bottom to the top. Loyalty from the top down is even more necessary and is much less prevalent.” General George S. Patton.
So what’s the problem? The problem today is one of both priorities and standards. We signal a dangerous shift in priorities (as just one example) when global warming, not preparedness to defeat aggressive global competitors, is considered the greatest problem for the Department of Defense and headquarters and rank inflation blossom out of control to the point that the support element greatly diminishes the ground combat element that wins wars. A problem of standards when every Service and the Special Operations community dilute requirements based purely on merit in favor of predetermined outcomes to favor social engineering goals, and when new training requirements crowd out expectations and measurements of combat performance.
This principle is the most clearly and frequently violated in our current military environment. Although the examples are many, the most egregious sidestepping of scientific evidence occurred when the U.S. Marine Corps’ lengthy examination of the effects of integrated (coed) ground combat performance was refuted and ignored (often by those who hadn’t read it). This brings to mind the verbiage used in another context: “inconvenient truths.”
The critical tasks outlined above may omit some essentials, but these serve as a starter and perhaps as a wake-up call. We have witnessed extraordinary and sacrificial service by our Armed Forces — too good to squander by confusing our military’s purpose with those of individuals who don’t pay in blood for their errors. And too good for a foe to misjudge our intrinsic toughness. In any case, these are not Critical Military Theories; these are Critical Military Facts.
+++
Greg Newbold is a retired Marine Corps Lieutenant General who commanded at every level from platoon to division. His last assignment was as Director of Operations for the Joint Staff in the Pentagon. In retirement, he operated a science and technology think tank, and co-founded a private equity firm and consulting group. He has been a director on a dozen non-profit and for profit companies.
3. Opinion | Biden doesn’t want to change China. He wants to beat it.
Excerpts:
As Biden’s second year in office began, U.S. tariffs on China were still in effect. U.S. and allied ships traversed the South China Sea more often. Sanctions for China’s human rights violations and restrictions on its technology and investments continued to pile up. Meanwhile, Beijing’s use of masks and other supplies since the pandemic began as tools of political coercion awakened other countries to the reality that China was a sometimes unreliable partner in a crisis.
At home, an unexpected consensus had emerged: Americans in both parties want the U.S. government to pursue a tougher approach to China, polls show. Ordinary Americans seem to understand that meeting the China challenge means abandoning the wishful thinking of the past — even if some influential voices do not. In November, CNN anchor and Post columnist Fareed Zakaria characterized the Biden administration’s approach to China as a failure because Beijing had not gotten on board. “What has been achieved by this tough talk? What new trade detail have you got? What concessions has China made? What climate agreement has been reached? What has been the net effect of all of that?” he asked Sullivan on CNN. “I think it’s the wrong way to think about it,” Sullivan responded. “The right way to think about it is, have we set the terms to an effective competition where the United States is in a position to defend its values and advance its interests not just in the Indo-Pacific but around the world?”
Of course, it’s hard to see China as the top issue in foreign policy when our government isn’t reorganizing to treat it as such. Some 85 percent of U.S. foreign military assistance still goes to the Middle East. Why aren’t U.S. government agencies that fund private business investments overseas working to match Chinese infrastructure projects such as the Belt and Road Initiative throughout Southeast Asia? Why isn’t there a trade policy for the region that U.S. officials can articulate? Why hasn’t Biden nominated anyone to be North Korean human rights envoy or ambassador to Thailand or for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations?
Year Two of the Biden presidency might bring answers to some of these questions. The Biden team says China is welcome to become a responsible leader in the current international system. But its actions are meant to cement a bipartisan consensus that can last for several presidencies — and disprove the contention that autocracies are better at long-term planning than democracies. If the competitors succeed, they could help preserve allied security, prosperity and public health. “Our intention is to prevail in this competition with China,” a State Department official said. “Let’s just be very clear about it. It’s a competition, and we intend to win it.”
Opinion | Biden doesn’t want to change China. He wants to beat it.
By Josh Rogin
Columnist
Today at 2:34 p.m. EST
During his four years in office, President Donald Trump tried to execute a sharp pivot in U.S. policy toward China, abandoning a 45-year-old foreign policy consensus aimed at persuading China to become more like the West. His administration’s strategy checking Chinese military and economic expansion through sanctions and tariffs was a sensible response to the regime of Xi Jinping. But the erratic and sometimes clumsy implementation by Trump’s dysfunctional mix of GOP hawks and MAGA aides prevented it from gaining broad acceptance in Washington or around the world.
To the surprise of many in Washington and Beijing, the Biden administration has largely followed Trump’s lead, keeping U.S. policy toward China on a more competitive — if not confrontational — footing, an approach now favored, in varying degrees, by lawmakers in both parties and likely to last as long as China continues its great leap backward. Restraining China is now a multi-administration, bipartisan strategy that stands among the most important foreign policy adjustments since the end of the Cold War.
If Trump’s China hands were an improbable team of rivals, President Biden’s are center-left internationalists who have worked together for years and believe that unless the United States acts more assertively, China will soon dominate the Asia-Pacific region and alter the world order to suit its interests. This group — let’s call them the “competitors” — includes most of the top U.S. foreign policy figures: Secretary of State Antony Blinken; national security adviser Jake Sullivan; the National Security Council’s Indo-Pacific coordinator, Kurt Campbell; the NSC’s senior director for China and Taiwan, Laura Rosenberger; and key officials at the Pentagon and State Department.
That mind-set isn’t unanimous. Scattered through the government are officials — let’s call them the “engagers” — who are determined to resist the new approach. Still, Biden is regarded to be squarely on the competitors’ team, having tapped so many of them to oversee his foreign policy. “The competitors understand that the United States is in a prolonged competition with China that we have to win but could lose,” said Thomas Wright, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “They feel a sense of urgency and the need to make big plays to shape the strategic environment, even if it’s difficult. It’s not enough just to maintain the status quo — China’s not standing still, and neither can the United States.”
Since Xi came to power in late 2012, the Chinese Communist Party has been expanding its military, intensifying internal repression and taking steps to undermine the Western-led system of free trade, rule of law and universal rights. Now, after decades of believing that China might someday fully join the multilateral economic system created after World War II, most U.S. officials no longer imagine that China can be more like us. Instead, the goal is to defend an international system that is under attack, protect the interests of the United States and its allies, and fight for the values that underpin our fundamental humanity against authoritarianism. The competitors represent a centrist foreign policy establishment that is regarded with deep suspicion by both the far left and the far right in American politics. They are trying to cement a long-term strategy toward China that can weather whatever administration comes next, and they know their time in power is short.
An unlikely reset
China had a warning shot waiting for Biden’s China hands when they walked into the White House on Jan. 20, 2021. That day, Beijing imposed sanctions on outgoing secretary of state Mike Pompeo, national security adviser Robert C. O’Brien, his deputy Matthew Pottinger and 25 other Trump officials, in retaliation for Washington’s posture toward China. The move was meant to threaten the newcomers: If you continue Trump’s policy, you will pay the same price.
One unfortunate aspect of the Trump years needed mending early: The former president’s bullying approach to allies had alienated large parts of the international community. Meanwhile, Trump’s racist rhetoric during the pandemic fueled rising hate and violence directed at Asian Americans here at home. That alienated progressives and politicized the issue in American politics, which narrowed the space for bipartisan cooperation on how to respond to China’s behavior. The Biden team knew that China was too big and powerful to confront without the support of both political parties and that of other countries facing the same threat.
The Biden team’s first move was not to launch the traditional review of U.S. policy often done by new presidents. Instead, the competitors spent several weeks huddling with allies, informing them of the hard line they intended to take toward Beijing and asking them to rally around it. In the early months of 2021, Rosenberger’s office at the NSC led hours-long “virtual roadshows” with officials in France, Germany, Britain and the Baltic states. The sessions were meant to reassure allies and hear them out so that U.S. officials could identify opportunities for cooperation as well as potential weaknesses in a united front.
Biden spoke with his counterparts in Japan, Australia and South Korea before finally accepting a call from Xi on Feb 10. The two-hour call was friendly. Xi tried the personal touch, retelling stories of the two men’s time together, suggesting his team had compiled research on their past interactions over the years. “We did get the sense that Xi had come into that first phone call hoping for a reset,” a senior Biden official said. “He really went out of his way to bash the Trump administration and blame them for all the ills that have befallen the United States and China.”
Despite the mostly positive call, the Biden team tried to make clear to Beijing that a friendlier reset of the relationship was not in the offing. Biden was also aware that his familiarity with Xi could be a liability. “Let’s get something straight,” he said later when questioned by a reporter. “We know each other well. We’re not old friends. It’s pure business.” The truth lay somewhere in between.
The Biden-Xi call paved the way for the first meeting of top diplomats a month later in Anchorage. On March 17, a day before the scheduled session, the Biden administration announced sanctions on 24 Chinese Communist Party officials for Beijing’s recent crackdown on democracy in Hong Kong, in part to show Biden would not back down from asserting American values. Then, at the top of the Anchorage meeting, while cameras rolled, Blinken listed the U.S. government’s “deep concerns” about China’s behavior on Hong Kong, Taiwan, cyberattacks and economic coercion.
China’s top diplomat, Yang Jiechi, and foreign minister, Wang Yi, reacted angrily. Yang insisted that reporters remain in the room while he accused the United States of its own human rights violations, including the “slaughtering” of Black Americans. “We believe that it is important for the United States to change its own image and to stop advancing its own democracy in the rest of the world,” he said. “Many people within the United States actually have little confidence in the democracy of the United States.”
Yang’s comments got most of the attention in news accounts, but at this stage both sides were opening with hard lines. Publicly, the Chinese said they wanted to be treated as equals. But, as they would later detail in two written lists of demands, what the Chinese really wanted was for the Biden administration to cease all criticism of anything Beijing considered a core — and therefore untouchable — issue. “Behind closed doors,” an American official said, “… it was quite clear both Yang and Wang really came to the table essentially saying, ‘Roll back all the Trump administration’s policies.’ They were given clear marching orders by the boss to take a very tough line and to show no give with the Americans and to really push us into trying to see if they could back us off our approach.”
Team Biden was having none of it. Three days after Anchorage, the administration announced new sanctions over China’s abuse of Uyghur Muslims. In effect, the U.S.-China relationship was at a stalemate, with both sides refusing to blink.
The competitors knew that many in the Washington bureaucracy, the business community, and China hands in think tanks and universities did not agree — or perhaps recognize — that the rules had changed. Lobbyists, former trade officials and others with economic incentives to keep U.S.-China relations on an even keel typically assumed Biden would end the Trump-era hostilities and return to the cooperation of the Barack Obama days. But, as the NSC’s Campbell would later explain, “The period that was broadly described as engagement has come to an end.”
One big change in the U.S. approach was to do away with “linkage.” No longer would China’s participation or progress on issues of common interest such as climate change or North Korea be grounds for Washington to grant concessions on other fronts. “We are not in the business of trading cooperation with China on climate change as a favor that Beijing is doing for the United States,” Sullivan said at the Aspen Security Forum in April.
To the Chinese leadership, however, it made little sense to work with Washington on, say, the climate, while the Biden administration was attacking Beijing on Hong Kong or Taiwan. It wasn’t long before Biden officials charged with reaching solutions on multilateral matters found themselves unable to make progress on any front. Those officials, in turn, often argued internally against many of the tougher policies.
Biden’s climate envoy, John F. Kerry, had been a leading proponent of engagement when he was secretary of state, once inviting Yang to his Boston home for the weekend. Now, Kerry’s main task was to gain China’s buy-in for the COP26 climate summit in November. In June, while Kerry was jetting back and forth to Beijing, the administration imposed crippling sanctions on China’s main silicon company. Chinese officials told Kerry they would not cooperate under these circumstances, and Kerry complained publicly about the squeeze. “On the one hand, we’re saying to them, ‘You have to do more to help deal with the climate,’” he told reporters. “And on the other hand, their solar panels are being sanctioned, which makes it harder for them to sell them.”
But if the Biden team had divisions, Beijing was unable to exploit them. In July, Deputy Secretary of State Wendy R. Sherman traveled to Tianjin, China, as part of an Asia tour. Here was a chance to engage with a top U.S. official not regarded as a proponent of more confrontation. But instead of welcoming Sherman, Beijing treated her with disrespect, refusing at first to give her high-level meetings and then — before her meetings had even concluded — releasing a harsh rendering of the session. “The United States wants to reignite the sense of national purpose by establishing China as an ‘imaginary enemy,’” Vice Foreign Minister Xie Feng told Sherman, according to the preemptive Chinese news release.
A superficial detente
Some modest progress came from Sherman’s visit. Working groups were established on journalist access and releasing detained Americans. Kerry managed to secure a bland statement from Beijing to distribute at the climate summit in November. Internally, Kerry often argued against measures that would increase pressure on China over its human rights abuses, several officials told me. Sherman took a tougher line than Kerry, but she remained focused on finding avenues for engagement. Despite their efforts, the administration continued to impose sanctions on China for a range of violations
By and large, the competitors won the important rounds. “You’ve got a cohort of people whose entire careers were made around engagement,” said Matthew Turpin, who served in the Pentagon during the Obama administration and in the NSC during the Trump administration. “And it didn’t work. So, we’re changing.”
The tactical differences between officials inside the Biden team are not to be confused with the more fundamental objections of some progressive Democrats, who view Biden’s tougher line with Beijing as a path toward more defense spending and inevitable conflict. In a June Foreign Affairs essay titled “Washington’s Dangerous New Consensus on China,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) advocated a relationship based on cooperation, not conflict. His arguments dovetail with those in official Communist Party propaganda: Don’t blame China’s aggression for the downturn in relations; blame the United States.
Both competitors and engagers take seriously Xi’s threats to Taiwan. But they don’t agree on what should be done. The competitors moved quietly to deepen U.S. cooperation with the Taipei government led by President Tsai Ing-wen: The State Department put out new rules for how to engage with Taiwanese officials even though Washington and Taipei lack formal diplomatic relations. The Pentagon assembled naval exercises in the South China Sea with allies as distant as the Netherlands. The NSC worked with the governments in Tokyo and Seoul — with some success — to be more public about their support for Taiwan.
Officially, U.S. policy regarding Taiwan has not changed. But unofficially, U.S. officials realize that the strategic balance across the Taiwan Strait is tilting heavily toward Beijing. Xi’s actions and rhetoric have sharpened fears he intends to unify China and Taiwan before he steps down. For all the maneuvering behind the scenes, however, Biden has sent mixed signals as to whether he would send U.S. forces to defend Taipei.
In September, the competitors made their biggest strategic play — a new alliance expanding military cooperation with Australia and the United Kingdom. Called “AUKUS,” the deal has at its cornerstone a commitment to share nuclear submarine technology with Australia. AUKUS was not the Biden team’s idea, a senior official told me; credit belonged to British and Australian officials. China had been battering Australia economically throughout the pandemic in retaliation for its government calling for an independent investigation into the origins of the coronavirus. Meanwhile, Britain was looking to shore up its alliances following Brexit. In response to the sub deal, China’s acting ambassador to Australia, Wang Xining, issued a vague threat: “There’s zero nuclear capacity, technologically, in Australia, that would guarantee you will be trouble free, you will be incident free. … And if anything happened, are the politicians ready to say sorry?”
Biden’s aides tried to mollify the French, who were incensed over a valuable arms contract nullified by the AUKUS deal. In the face of Beijing’s ire, the president seemed to want to turn down the temperature. “We are not seeking a new Cold War or a world divided into rigid blocs,” he said at the United Nations that month.
But the strategy continued. Three days later, Biden hosted the leaders of Australia, Japan and India for talks, his first such meeting with the leaders of “the Quad,” a multinational group that emerged from the international response to the 2004 Southeast Asian tsunami and has evolved since then into a diplomatic counterweight to China in Asia.
Step by step, the Biden team had by fall put in place a tough China policy of its own design, more nuanced than Trump’s. Biden officials had rained sanctions on China, reinforced the alliance diplomatically and to some degree militarily, and yet made clear that it wanted to keep channels to Beijing open. This stiff but mostly consistent behavior was something Beijing could at least understand.
Now the goal was to translate that understanding into a stable, if not exactly friendly, relationship. Biden and Xi had a phone call in September that was used to tee up a meeting between their designated envoys: Yang representing Xi; Sullivan representing Biden. The resulting six-hour meeting in Zurich on Oct. 6 was considered by those on the U.S. side to be the most professional conversation between the two governments in 2021. Gone were the public insults. A long list of issues was constructively discussed, though there were no big breakthroughs. At the end, Yang and Sullivan met one-on-one, with only interpreters in the room.
The Zurich meeting paved the way for a virtual summit between Biden and Xi on Nov. 15, which produced broad agreement to pursue “strategic stability.” Afterward, both governments praised steps that might lead to cooperation on nuclear nonproliferation and countering narcotics. The Washington establishment hailed the Biden-Xi virtual summit as a needed improvement to the tense relationship. Internally, the Biden team regarded it more modestly — “as a steam release valve,” one official said, “that let off a bit of the pressure that’s building in the containerized object.”
Almost immediately, the superficial detente came under strain. In early December, the administration announced it would send no officials to the Winter Olympics in Beijing, to protest China’s extensive human rights abuses. Soon after, the public war of words resumed.
The road ahead
Upon returning to government, several top Biden officials said they were struck by how determined Beijing had become in implementing Xi’s strategy against the West. U.S. intelligence assessments, they said, portray Xi as a man in a hurry to secure China’s supremacy in the hierarchy of nations and prove the superiority of its autocratic system. Xi has shared this intention with others, including Biden, who has mentioned it in private and in public. “From China to Russia and beyond, they’re betting the democracies’ days are numbered. They’ve actually told me democracy is too slow, too bogged down by division to succeed in today’s rapidly changing, complicated world,” Biden said on Jan. 6.
The competitors have not always prevailed inside the Biden administration. Early on, the NSC’s Campbell and his team pushed for the White House to reserve vaccine donations for strategic allies in Asia, including Taiwan and South Korea. China was engaged in heavy-handed vaccine diplomacy, which included coercing countries such as Paraguay and Nicaragua to drop their diplomatic recognition of Taiwan in exchange for vaccine supplies. The State Department team in charge of vaccine distribution objected, noting that the United States should not play politics with vaccines. Yet Beijing was doing just that: Days after Nicaragua switched its diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to China, Beijing delivered a million doses to Managua. The competitors understand that large parts of the government are not on board with their approach.
Meanwhile, many in the business community and Wall Street continued to press the Biden team to let go of the tariffs and sanctions that constitute the leverage of the competitive approach, and smooth relations with Beijing for the economy’s sake. Inside the Treasury and Commerce departments, senior officials continue to resist the harder line. This year will bring internal fights over trade policy, whether to engage Beijing on North Korea and inevitably rising tensions across the Taiwan Strait. Holding a firm line with Beijing is likely to get harder, not easier. Nonetheless, an NSC spokesman said Biden’s team “is moving out in unison in executing our strategy: out-competing China in the long term by investing in ourselves and aligning with our allies and partners.”
As Biden’s second year in office began, U.S. tariffs on China were still in effect. U.S. and allied ships traversed the South China Sea more often. Sanctions for China’s human rights violations and restrictions on its technology and investments continued to pile up. Meanwhile, Beijing’s use of masks and other supplies since the pandemic began as tools of political coercion awakened other countries to the reality that China was a sometimes unreliable partner in a crisis.
At home, an unexpected consensus had emerged: Americans in both parties want the U.S. government to pursue a tougher approach to China, polls show. Ordinary Americans seem to understand that meeting the China challenge means abandoning the wishful thinking of the past — even if some influential voices do not. In November, CNN anchor and Post columnist Fareed Zakaria characterized the Biden administration’s approach to China as a failure because Beijing had not gotten on board. “What has been achieved by this tough talk? What new trade detail have you got? What concessions has China made? What climate agreement has been reached? What has been the net effect of all of that?” he asked Sullivan on CNN. “I think it’s the wrong way to think about it,” Sullivan responded. “The right way to think about it is, have we set the terms to an effective competition where the United States is in a position to defend its values and advance its interests not just in the Indo-Pacific but around the world?”
Of course, it’s hard to see China as the top issue in foreign policy when our government isn’t reorganizing to treat it as such. Some 85 percent of U.S. foreign military assistance still goes to the Middle East. Why aren’t U.S. government agencies that fund private business investments overseas working to match Chinese infrastructure projects such as the Belt and Road Initiative throughout Southeast Asia? Why isn’t there a trade policy for the region that U.S. officials can articulate? Why hasn’t Biden nominated anyone to be North Korean human rights envoy or ambassador to Thailand or for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations?
Year Two of the Biden presidency might bring answers to some of these questions. The Biden team says China is welcome to become a responsible leader in the current international system. But its actions are meant to cement a bipartisan consensus that can last for several presidencies — and disprove the contention that autocracies are better at long-term planning than democracies. If the competitors succeed, they could help preserve allied security, prosperity and public health. “Our intention is to prevail in this competition with China,” a State Department official said. “Let’s just be very clear about it. It’s a competition, and we intend to win it.”
4. ‘From the White House down,’ pleas for help disrupted Afghan evacuation, top U.S. commander says
Vasely told investigators that the administration briefly considered extending the evacuation operation into September, but the idea was scuttled after Taliban leaders had a “visceral response” to the proposal. While the militants had been helpful in providing security at the airport perimeter, Vasely said he feared they could shift to hostage-taking or trigger a surge of civilians onto the runway by launching indirect fire at parked aircraft and the runway.
Vasely said he advised Biden that it would be prudent to stick with the agreed-upon deadline. The White House official said senior leaders in Washington, including at the Pentagon, all thought it wise to end the operation in August.
Mark Jacobson, a former Pentagon official during the Obama administration, said Wednesday that he had heard frustrations from military officials about the unsustainable number of requests for help. The frenzy, he said, led several volunteer groups — many headed by American veterans of the Afghanistan war — to pass along the names of Afghans who had helped the United States and “were supposed to be at the front of the queue.”
“Once it became the ‘Hunger Games,’” volunteers “tried to get whomever we could through the gates,” as former interpreters and other Afghan allies were being hunted by Taliban fighters outside, Jacobson said, alluding to the book and movie series in which people fight to the death.
‘From the White House down,’ pleas for help disrupted Afghan evacuation, top U.S. commander says
The U.S. military mission to evacuate American citizens and foreign allies from Afghanistan was hampered by continuous appeals for help from an array of advocates including White House officials, members of Congress, veterans of the war, media outlets and even the Vatican, according to the operation’s senior commander.
Rear Adm. Peter Vasely called the outreach a “distraction” that “created competition for already stressed resources.” His comments appear in sworn testimony provided for a U.S. Army investigation of the Aug. 26 suicide bombing that killed an estimated 170 Afghan civilians and 13 U.S. service members outside Kabul’s international airport.
The declassified report, spanning 2,000 pages and comprising dozens of interviews with military officials, was obtained by The Washington Post through a Freedom of Information Act request. It contains the most detailed official account to date of the 17-day evacuation, hastily orchestrated as the Taliban swept into Afghanistan’s capital Aug. 15, and reveals that military leaders had deep misgivings about the Biden administration’s management of the crisis.
Thousands of phone calls, text messages and emails flooded the U.S. operations center at Kabul’s airport throughout the evacuation, prompting Vasely, a Navy SEAL, to divert personnel and establish a “coordination cell” responsible for processing the overwhelming volume of communications from Washington and beyond, he told investigators. Vasely said social media exacerbated the problem, broadening the “aperture of ambition” to the point that people even campaigned for the military to rescue specific dogs.
The stated priority, the admiral said, had been to first evacuate American citizens, followed by lawful permanent residents, and then Afghans who had aided the United States throughout its 20-year war.
“But you had everyone from the White House down with a new flavor of the day for prioritization,” Vasely told the Army investigators.
The requests came from people or groups seeking to work through official and unofficial channels. In other interviews contained in the investigation report, U.S. troops described being inundated with pleas for help — voice mails and emails from people they had, in some cases, never met but who had discovered they were a part of the rescue operation.
The calls for help became more frantic as it became clear the evacuation would not be extended. Among those who sought the U.S. government’s assistance were media outlets, including The Washington Post, who had Western journalists and Afghan staff members in harm’s way. This outreach is detailed within the report, and Biden administration officials underscored the point in responding to questions about the documents.
Vasely could not be reached for comment. As The Post first reported earlier this week, he and other military leaders involved in the effort also told investigators that senior White House and State Department officials had failed to grasp the Taliban’s steady advance on Afghanistan’s capital and resisted efforts by the Pentagon to prepare the evacuation of embassy personnel and Afghan allies weeks before Kabul’s fall.
Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said the report shows that a lot of good people across the U.S. government “were working hard under incredibly difficult circumstances to make the best decisions they could in real time,” and that effort was unprecedented.
“Nothing like this had been attempted since the end of the Vietnam War,” he said. “Everyone’s heart, up and down the chain, was in the right place.”
A U.S. official, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity citing the issue’s continued sensitivity, said “it’s important to keep in mind that these are interviews with investigators, not reporters.”
“The people being interviewed weren’t trying to score points, weren’t messaging anyone,” the official said. “They were simply doing their level best to help investigators get to the bottom of a terrible attack.”
Biden administration officials have defended their planning in the lead-up to August’s withdrawal, with White House press secretary Jen Psaki saying this week that the National Security Council convened meetings for months to assess the situation in Afghanistan and directed the pre-positioning of U.S. troops elsewhere in the region in case a crisis erupted. They could not have anticipated that the Afghan security forces would so completely wilt in the face of the Taliban’s stunning advance, she said.
President Biden sought to ensure the military had everything it needed to carry out the evacuation as it played out, administration officials said.
“The president, at least once at each meeting — and these meetings were daily — would directly ask the people who were on the ground in Kabul, ‘Is there anything else that you need to execute what you’ve been asked to do?’” said Jon Finer, the White House principal deputy national security adviser.
The evacuation succeeded in extracting about 124,000 people before it ended around midnight on Aug. 31. But it required the U.S. military to strike an unusual security deal with the Taliban and surge more than 5,000 troops into the war zone to shore up the skeleton force of about 600 who were left in Kabul to protect American diplomats.
Vasely, in his interview for the investigation, acknowledged that not all of the outside intervention was problematic.
“There was all goodness in this, but the lesson learned is it was a distraction from the main effort as they were coming directly to the individuals on the ground trying to accomplish the task at hand,” he said, adding that he “only can speculate” whether the confusion and competition was responsible for some American citizens and foreigners being left behind.
The Army’s lead investigator, Brig. Gen. Lance Curtis, asked Vasely whether reports were true that Pope Francis and first lady Jill Biden had requested help on behalf of specific people who remained in harm’s way.
“That’s accurate,” Vasely responded. “I was being contacted by representatives from the Holy See to assist the Italian military contingent … in getting through groups … of special interest to the Vatican. That is just one of many examples.
“I cannot stress enough,” the admiral added, “how these high-profile requests ate up bandwidth and created competition for already stressed resources.”
A White House official said operational control of the mission was left to Vasely. Like lawmakers and others with ties to Afghanistan, White House officials sought to send U.S. troops in Kabul information that might help the effort.
“That was people in good faith trying to facilitate the evacuation of people they were concerned about,” the official said.
Vasely told investigators that by Aug. 22 or 23, “it was clear we weren’t going to get all Americans out” and that he “started having conversations at senior levels” of the U.S. government about extending the mission beyond the Aug. 31 deadline.
In Washington, Biden pledged in a news conference on Aug. 22 that no American who wanted to leave would be left behind. “I will say again today [what] I have said before: Any American who wants to get home will get home,” the president said.
The White House official said the situation on the ground was changing rapidly, and the administration has continued to evacuate Americans since the military operation ended.
When the mission ended, State Department officials said they believed there were about 100 American citizens left in Afghanistan who wanted to leave. They revised that several times, eventually saying that more than 450 left with American assistance after the military evacuation concluded. The White House official said it is believed that everyone who wanted to leave now has.
Vasely told investigators that the administration briefly considered extending the evacuation operation into September, but the idea was scuttled after Taliban leaders had a “visceral response” to the proposal. While the militants had been helpful in providing security at the airport perimeter, Vasely said he feared they could shift to hostage-taking or trigger a surge of civilians onto the runway by launching indirect fire at parked aircraft and the runway.
Vasely said he advised Biden that it would be prudent to stick with the agreed-upon deadline. The White House official said senior leaders in Washington, including at the Pentagon, all thought it wise to end the operation in August.
Mark Jacobson, a former Pentagon official during the Obama administration, said Wednesday that he had heard frustrations from military officials about the unsustainable number of requests for help. The frenzy, he said, led several volunteer groups — many headed by American veterans of the Afghanistan war — to pass along the names of Afghans who had helped the United States and “were supposed to be at the front of the queue.”
“Once it became the ‘Hunger Games,’” volunteers “tried to get whomever we could through the gates,” as former interpreters and other Afghan allies were being hunted by Taliban fighters outside, Jacobson said, alluding to the book and movie series in which people fight to the death.
Scott Mann, co-founder of Task Force Pineapple, a volunteer group that assisted Afghans during the evacuation, said he could see that military officials at the airport were swamped. His group sought to limit their communications with military officials to agreed-upon times, he said.
Mann, a retired Special Forces officer, said that he has discussed with U.S. troops who were at the airport whether his task force was helpful, and was assured that it was. Mann said the group received calls from lawmakers and very senior military officials who wanted to evacuate certain people, and that some of them had influence but chose to keep quiet through the chaos.
“Just about every volunteer group can tell you stories about lawmakers and other people with authority calling and saying, ‘You need to get my guy out,’" Mann said.
5. U.S. Military Offers New Details on Raid That Led to Death of ISIS Leader
Who is talking out of school?
U.S. Military Offers New Details on Raid That Led to Death of ISIS Leader
Feb. 10, 2022
Updated 7:58 p.m. ET
The explosion that killed Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi in Syria was most likely caused by a bomb he had rigged, U.S. military officials said.
The damaged house where Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurashi died during a raid by U.S. commandos in northwestern Syria last week.
Feb. 10, 2022Updated 5:18 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON — The blast that killed the Islamic State’s leader during a Special Operations raid in northwestern Syria last week was most likely caused by a large bomb the terrorist rigged to destroy most of his third-floor residence, senior U.S. military officials said on Thursday.
The explosion was so powerful that military officials now suspect that a child found dead on the building’s second floor was killed by the blast’s concussive force, not in a firefight between the child’s parents and the commandos. The child had no visible injuries from gunshots or falling debris, the officials said.
The Pentagon has acknowledged seven deaths — four civilians and three Islamic State fighters — in the raid to capture or kill the leader, Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi. But the military officials acknowledged on Thursday that more bodies might have been recovered from the rubble after the commandos had left the scene. Rescue workers have said women and children were among at least 13 killed during the assault.
New details about the pre-dawn assault are emerging a week after President Biden said he had ordered commandos to seize the ISIS leader, rather than bomb the entire three-story building, to minimize the risks to civilians. Pentagon officials have said that 10 people, including eight children, were safely evacuated. Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III said the military would review whether the mission had harmed civilians.
The two-hour raid in the town of Atmeh near the Turkish border came days after the end of the largest U.S. combat involvement with the Islamic State since the jihadists’ so-called caliphate fell three years ago. American forces backed a Kurdish-led militia in northeastern Syria as it fought for more than a week to oust Islamic State fighters from a prison they had occupied in the city of Hasaka.
The battle for the prison killed hundreds of people and offered a bleak reminder that even after the collapse of the caliphate, and now the death of Mr. al-Qurayshi, the group’s ability to sow chaotic violence persists. Indeed, a United Nations counterterrorism report issued this week estimated that the Islamic State still retains 6,000 to 10,000 fighters across Iraq and Syria, “where it is forming cells and training operatives to launch attacks.”
Also this week, the State Department offered a reward of up to $10 million for information leading to the identification or location of Sanaullah Ghafari, the leader of Islamic State Khorasan, or ISIS-K, the group’s branch in Afghanistan. The terrorist group claimed responsibility for an attack at Kabul’s international airport on Aug. 26 that killed 13 U.S. service members and as many as 170 civilians during the American-led evacuation.
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On Thursday, two senior U.S. military officials described the planning and execution of the raid to a small group of reporters on a teleconference. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters.
The mission, led by Delta Force commandos, was set in motion last September with a tip that the ISIS leader was hiding out on the top floor of a house in northwestern Syria. Overseen by the military’s Central Command, the commandos rehearsed dozens of times, and Mr. Biden was briefed on an exercise involving a tabletop model of the building. The troops also practiced using a mock-up of the building that they would eventually raid.
By late December, the commandos were ready and Mr. Biden approved the mission. But bad weather in northwestern Syria and a desire to carry out the mission on a moonless night pushed the operation to Feb. 2.
The American assault in Atmeh, backed by Apache helicopter gunships and armed MQ-9 Reaper drones, resembled the raid in October 2019 in which Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the previous leader of the Islamic State, died when he detonated a suicide vest as U.S. forces raided a hide-out not far from where last week’s operation took place.
American officials alerted Israel, Turkey and Russia, which has troops based in northwestern Syria, shortly before the mission was underway to avoid any accidental contact, the officials said.
American officials have previously said Mr. al-Qurayshi, also known as Hajji Abdullah, lived with his wife and two children on the building’s third floor. He left the building only occasionally to bathe on the rooftop. He relied on a top lieutenant who lived on the building’s second floor and who, along with a network of couriers, carried out his orders to ISIS branches in Iraq, Syria and elsewhere in the world. A Syrian family with no apparent connection to the terrorist group was living on the first floor.
Shortly after the commandos arrived just after midnight, warnings shouted in Arabic over bullhorns urged occupants on the first floor — as well as anyone else — to evacuate. A man, a woman and four children fled the first floor.
At almost the same time, a huge explosion — much bigger than a suicide vest with 5 to 10 pounds of explosive, officials said on Thursday — ripped through the third floor. The blast was so powerful that bodies, including Mr. al-Qurayshi’s, were blown out the window.
Mr. Biden said last week that Mr. al-Qurayshi died when the terrorist exploded a bomb that killed him as well as members of his family. Military officials said on Thursday that they had no proof that Mr. al-Qurayshi detonated the bomb but thought so, given his position. The officials emphasized that the U.S. commandos did not attack the third floor or detonate any explosives, and caused none of the casualties.
After the blast, commandos stormed the building and engaged in a firefight with Mr. al-Qurayshi’s lieutenant and his wife, who were barricaded on the second floor with their children. Both died, as did one child, but four children were safely evacuated, U.S. officials said.
A 13-year-old boy who was among those evacuated from the first floor described his family’s terror at being taken from their home in the middle of the night.
The commandos had thrown his father to the ground and kicked him before picking him up and searching his body for weapons, the boy said, giving only his first name, Muhammad, for fear of retribution.
“I felt like I had reached my death and that there was no escape,” he told a reporter for The New York Times two days after the raid. “I figured when I saw them throw my father to the ground that they were going to kill him, to shoot him.”
His mother fled the house later and the commandos had torn off her head scarf and dragged her by her hair, he said.
After the operation, the Americans questioned the family about their upstairs neighbors and they replied that they had not known them well, he said.
Before the Americans left, they told the family, “We, here, killed the leader of ISIS,” the boy said.
The four children who were evacuated from the house after their parents were killed in the firefight on the second floor included two boys — a baby and a 2-year-old — and two girls, 3 and 12, he said.
The commandos left them with his family, the boy said, and they were taken the next morning by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, an Islamist group formerly linked to Al Qaeda that controls the area.
The group has not said where it took the children.
Eric Schmitt reported from Washington, and Ben Hubbard from Beirut, Lebanon. Muhammad Haj Kadour contributed reporting from Atmeh, Syria.
6. The Army Vet Who Was Prepping Civilians for a 'Pending' Civil War
At least the guy has a sense of humor but I wonder if the use of Tackleberry from the comedy film Police Academy is an indicator. Is that how his trainees turn out? Or is it just that the joke is on anyone who pays $500 for an IED course and $25,000 for "in person" SERE training from this wacko.
Arthur, 38, served in the Army as a cavalry scout, with a career oscillating between the National Guard and active duty that culminated in the rank of sergeant at the end of his nearly decade of service.
Trading off of the training he'd received, and the reputation of and claims about his extensive experience as a soldier, he ran Tackleberry Solutions, a combat school for civilians. For years, he taught weapons skills, setting up fighting positions and how to evade capture. He even bred and trained dogs, videotaping showcases of their attack skills.
The Army Vet Who Was Prepping Civilians for a 'Pending' Civil War
Christopher Arthur built a business off his military skills, conspiracy theories and eagerness for a second civil war -- promising to teach potential students how to kill cops and military personnel, often by defending their homes with explosives and other deadly traps. Now, he faces 20 years behind bars.
Arthur, 38, served in the Army as a cavalry scout, with a career oscillating between the National Guard and active duty that culminated in the rank of sergeant at the end of his nearly decade of service.
Trading off of the training he'd received, and the reputation of and claims about his extensive experience as a soldier, he ran Tackleberry Solutions, a combat school for civilians. For years, he taught weapons skills, setting up fighting positions and how to evade capture. He even bred and trained dogs, videotaping showcases of their attack skills.
But his lessons weren't intended for civilians to dip their toe into military-style training for fun. Arthur was seemingly preparing eager students in guerrilla warfare to fight against the U.S. military and law enforcement, based on a Military.com review of training materials he used.
"I realized that we were suffering from the same disease the Iraqis were plagued by and that was tribalism," he said in a video with his elementary school-aged son on his lap. "I began to notice the same issues here in America. Politics began to infest our daily lives. … I knew that was going to lead to a war."
He posted multiple videos online detailing how to fortify homes to repel law enforcement and how to "cause casualties and chaos." This included methods to funnel police and their vehicles into tight spaces, which would be laced with bombs.
Arthur was arrested in January and charged with teaching another individual how to make and use explosives, knowing that person intended to use his instructions in "the attempted murder of federal law enforcement," a statement from the Department of Justice said.
Military.com attempted to reach out to Arthur through multiple phone numbers associated with him and his company. He never returned a request for comment, while some numbers appeared to be disconnected. His attorney declined to comment for this story.
Arthur served in the North Carolina National Guard from May 2006 to May 2007, according to Army records. He served on active duty from May 2007 to July 2010. He later rejoined the Guard, serving again from 2014 to 2019. He had a short deployment to Iraq from July 2007 to December of that year, and later returned for a yearlong tour in 2009.
Cavalry scouts, Arthur's specialty in the Army, usually have significant training in combat skills, including the use of a wide arsenal of weapons. He seemingly glamorized his military resume further, often discussing Special Forces courses that he strongly suggested he attended. He also made multiple comments seemingly meant to imply he was a Green Beret, a background he didn't have, according to Army records.
He also referred to himself as a "recon soldier," and made other vague references to his military experience. While cavalry scouts are the Army's main conventional ground reconnaissance force, and serve as a major part of the service's combat power, it's an abnormal reference to his actual role in the military.
The FBI's case against Arthur can be traced back to 2018, according to court documents. Authorities had been tipped off about a different person who was "attempting to organize and recruit for a militia group" to fight the U.S. government.
In June 2020, police stopped that suspect, Joshua Blessed, who fled a traffic stop in a semitruck in Harrisonburg, Virginia, according to reporting from the Democrat & Chronicle. Blessed was gunned down by police after firing on them following a two-hour chase.
Court records say when Blessed's vehicle was searched, authorities found three improvised explosive devices. Additional explosives and firearms were found at his home, along with multiple Tackleberry Solutions course materials. Investigators also say Blessed attended in-person classes taught by Arthur for several days in March that year.
The FBI then launched an investigation on Arthur and his company. Law enforcement asked Arthur for training materials, which he gave them, seemingly unaware he was talking to authorities. He told the federal investigators he had to keep some materials "off of the internet since explosives were such a touchy topic."
His training includes a $500 course on improvised explosives and $25,000 for in-person training on Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, or SERE, training. SERE training is a school in the military, often for special operations personnel and pilots, which trains troops how to survive alone behind enemy lines, resist torture and escape from captors. Cavalry scouts rarely, if ever, attend the course.
"What I needed to focus on was the pending war and that if we did not take the information that was in my head, which was not even common knowledge through the military," Arthur said in one video. "The main thing that's going to be the difference between life or death is that knowledge, and it's being lost, it's not being taught."
In May 2021, an FBI informant met with Arthur at his home in Mount Olive, North Carolina. There, Arthur explained "how to properly place IEDs [improvised explosive devices] through one's property, the importance of creating a fatal funnel, the setup and use of remote-activated firearms, and how to evade arrest after killing members of law enforcement -- all after learning the recipient of the explanation intended to kill federal law enforcement who might come to his home," according to an FBI affidavit.
IEDs are the homemade bombs that were responsible for many of the casualties troops experienced during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as they are cheap and often made without using hard-to-find military ordnance.
Arthur then demonstrated how to use tripwire switches to detonate bombs and how to buld the explosives themselves.
"Law enforcement officers are being feloniously killed in the line of duty at an alarming rate. 2021 saw the most officers murdered since the 9/11 attacks. The behavior alleged in this indictment, training someone in methods of how to kill or injure law enforcement, is both serious and frightening," Robert R. Wells, an FBI special agent, said in a press release.
Arthur's arrest comes as the military struggles to find ways to combat extremism in the ranks and as veteran organizations grapple with radicalization in the veteran community. There's scant evidence those with military backgrounds are more prone to fall into extreme ideologies, but experts warn their training and inherent social credibility as service members or veterans can be dangerous.
The National Guard saw two of its soldiers, both infantrymen, join in the pro-Trump mob on Jan. 6, 2021, that violently stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to subvert the peaceful transfer of power to President Joe Biden. The Wisconsin National Guard has allowed Pfc. Abram Markofski to continue his service, despite pleading guilty to his part in the attack. Cpl. Jacob Fracker, a Virginia Guardsman, is no longer participating in any military training until his trial concludes.
After Arthur was taken into custody, a search of his home found multiple IEDs; an IED striker plate; an electronic IED trigger and other IED components; a pistol suppressor; bulk gunpowder; and mixed Tannerite, an explosive compound usually used for rifle targets.
"The Justice Department will aggressively investigate and prosecute those whose actions would further violence against those in uniform," United States Attorney Michael Easley said in a statement announcing Arthur's arrest. "Our public servants in law enforcement deserve nothing less."
7. TikTok shares your data more than any other social media app — and it's unclear where it goes, study says
Someone also flagged this 30 minute video that is worth watching after you read the article below, especially for anyone who does not use or understand TikTok. https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=t7STD2ESmWg. The video provides "the raw and unfiltered truth about Tik Tok." "Someone has transformed what was once a lip syncing app for teens into the greatest cyber threat in human history."
TikTok shares your data more than any other social media app — and it's unclear where it goes, study says
CNBC · by Tom Huddleston Jr. · February 8, 2022
Two of your social media apps could be collecting a lot of data on you — and you might not like what one of them is doing with it.
That's according to a recent study, published last month by mobile marketing company URL Genius, which found that YouTube and TikTok track users' personal data more than any other social media apps.
The study found that YouTube, which is owned by Google, mostly collects your personal data for its own purposes — like tracking your online search history, or even your location, to serve you relevant ads. But TikTok, which is owned by Chinese tech giant ByteDance, mostly allows third-party trackers to collect your data — and from there, it's hard to say what happens with it.
With third-party trackers, it's essentially impossible to know who's tracking your data or what information they're collecting, from which posts you interact with — and how long you spend on each one — to your physical location and any other personal information you share with the app.
As the study noted, third-party trackers can track your activity on other sites even after you leave the app.
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Inside a travel influencer's $44,000 condo in Detroit, MI
To conduct the study, URL Genius used the Record App Activity feature from Apple's iOS to count how many different domains track a user's activity across 10 different social media apps — YouTube, TikTok, Twitter, Telegram, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, Messenger and Whatsapp — over the course of one visit, before you even log into your account.
YouTube and TikTok topped the other apps with 14 network contacts apiece, significantly higher than the study's average number of six network contacts per app. Those numbers are all probably higher for users who are logged into accounts on those apps, the study noted.
Ten of YouTube's trackers were first-party network contacts, meaning the platform was tracking user activity for its own purposes. Four of the contacts were from third-party domains, meaning the social platform was allowing a handful of mystery outside parties to collect information and track user activity.
For TikTok, the results were even more mysterious: 13 of the 14 network contacts on the popular social media app were from third parties. The third-party tracking still happened even when users didn't opt into allowing tracking in each app's settings, according to the study.
"Consumers are currently unable to see what data is shared with third-party networks, or how their data will be used," the report's authors wrote.
In October, Wired published a guide to how TikTok tracks user data, including your location, search history, IP address, the videos you watch and how long you spend watching them. According to that guide, TikTok can "infer" personal characteristics from your age range to your gender based on the other information it collects. Google and other sites do the same thing, a practice called "inferred demographics."
TikTok has been the subject of criticism in the past over how the company collects and uses data, especially from younger users, including claims that the company has transferred some private user data to Chinese servers.
As CNBC noted last year, TikTok's privacy policy states that the app can share user data with its Chinese parent company, though it claims to employ security measures to "safeguard sensitive user data."
In 2020, then-President Donald Trump looked to ban TikTok in the U.S. over concerns about the app's data security policies, before current President Joe Biden walked back those threats and ordered a review of potential security threats posed by foreign-owned apps.
Neither TikTok nor YouTube immediately responded to CNBC Make It's request for comment.
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8. Is the U.S. Army Preparing to Fight Americans?
Now this is quite a piece of propaganda for all the conspiracy theorists out there.
Is the U.S. Army Preparing to Fight Americans?
The dangers of radical-left leadership are being exposed.
United States special forces candidates just finished the “Robin Sage” exercise in North and South Carolina, which depicts fighting “realistic opposing forces and guerrilla freedom fighters,” according to a press release. This exercise is done on private land spanning both states in the imaginary country of Pineland. “The exercise is so realistic and spans such a large area that the U.S. Army has issued notices to local law enforcement agencies warning them not to mistake the exercise for a real insurrection, an error that has cost one soldier his life during a previous ‘Robin Sage’ event,” wrote Brett Tingley at the Drive.
The exercise is organized by the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School (swcs) based in Fort Bragg. The exercise has taken place annually since 1974. As Tingley explained, most tactical situations experienced by the U.S. Army in recent years have featured fighting unconventional forces:
The types of operational environments the U.S. military has found itself in since 9/11 have been largely characterized by conflict between states and non-state actors such as terrorist or paramilitary groups. Many of the tactical and strategic options that would apply to a conventional war or large-scale conflict between peer state competitors do not apply to these types of conflicts. For that reason, swcs uses Robin Sage to prepare Army special operators for unconventional warfare environments in which they are forced to call upon their training in small-unit tactics, negotiation skills, key leader engagements and guerrilla warfare.
This exercise is a normal procedure as the U.S. military trains special forces and seeks to increase military readiness. What should worry Americans is that the U.S. leadership is using government institutions to attack Americans. The Biden administration has labeled parents critical of radical school boards “domestic terrorists” and has authorized the creation of a special unit at the Federal Bureau of Investigation to target domestic terrorists, including those who were present at the Capitol on January 6.
U.S. military leadership has been hijacked by the radical left and is actively pushing radical, racial and woke agendas on all service branches. Those who support Donald Trump are branded as far-right extremists. Those seeking vaccine exemptions for religious beliefs have found it impossible to obtain them.
Three retired U.S. generals wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post warning that the U.S. military must be preparing for an insurrection in the 2024 election. Paul D. Eaton, Antonio M. Taguba and Steven M. Anderson wrote that when the next election is contested, the military could be split between competing factions, each supporting the candidate they believe won. They urged a strict purging of the ranks, stating, “The goal should be to identify, isolate and remove potential mutineers; guard against efforts by propagandists who use misinformation to subvert the chain of command; and understand how that and other misinformation spreads across the ranks after it is introduced by propagandists.”
“[T]he Defense Department should war-game the next potential post-election insurrection or coup attempt to identify weak spots,” they wrote. “It must then conduct a top-down debrief of its findings and begin putting in place safeguards to prevent breakdowns not just in the military, but also in any agency that works hand in hand with the military.” Based on the first year of Lloyd Austin’s tenure as secretary of defense, it is not hard to imagine war games like the annual “Robin Sage” exercise being used to prepare for targeting political opponents of the radical left.
More and more evidence is emerging that the Biden administration is a fake presidency and that the January 6 riot was a fake insurrection. The rigged election was the real insurrection. This is putting the members of the armed forces in a difficult situation, where the facts of what really happened directly contradict the narrative of their superiors and commander in chief. The military has also endured humiliating retreats under this administration. These factors are creating a highly unstable situation, as theTrumpet.com managing editor Brad Macdonald explained in “How Afghanistan Could Help Donald Trump Return to the Presidency”:
Veterans and active-duty servicemen are among the most patriotic Americans you will find. Many joined the military because they had a strong sense of duty to their nation. They wanted to protect America. At what point will some veterans consider it their duty to protect America by actively resisting the U.S. government and its war on traditional America?
It takes some imagination to see a modern superpower like America experiencing some sort of military uprising. But think, this time last year it was hard to imagine what happened with the national election. America today is in uncharted territory, politically, economically, socially, culturally and militarily. We need to be ready for anything.
The tide is turning against the radical left, but the radical left is intent on maintaining control of the military, and all other institutions of government. Bible prophecy indicates Donald Trump will return as president, though we do not know how specifically. To make sure you are ready for the future, please read Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry’s free booklets America Under Attack and Great Again. The spiritual reality described in these booklets powerfully demonstrates that we should not underestimate how hard the radical left may fight to keep control of the country.
9. Russia could again invade Ukraine during Olympics, Blinken says
I wonder if perhaps Xi and CHina would welcome this so the pressure on China could be diverted from the Olympics. I do not think the Olympics are achieving the effects Xi and the CCP hoped for. And if north Korea acts out simultaneously, the revisionist and rogue powers will create dilemmas for us.
Russia could again invade Ukraine during Olympics, Blinken says
Blinken did not detail the reasons behind the State Department’s latest security alert that calls on all American citizens to leave Ukraine.
“Simply put, we continue to see very troubling signs of Russian escalation, including new forces arriving at the Ukrainian border,” Blinken said in Canberra, Australia.
“We’re in a window when an invasion could begin at any time and, to be clear, that includes during the Olympics,” Blinken added. The Olympic Games are scheduled to end on Feb. 20.
Russia has amassed over 100,000 troops near Ukraine. It says it has no plans to invade but wants the West to keep Ukraine and other former Soviet countries out of NATO.
The threat of war in Ukraine and a strengthened alliance between Russia and China were high on the agenda of a meeting in Canberra on Friday among Blinken and his counterparts from India, Japan and Australia.
RELATED
The airborne infantry troops of the 82nd Airborne Division arrived at the Rzeszow-Jasionka airport on a U.S. Army Boeing C-17 Globemaster plane.
The four nations form the “Quad,” a bloc of Indo-Pacific democracies created to counter China’s growing regional influence.
Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne, who chaired the meeting, said the alliance between Moscow and Beijing was “concerning because it doesn’t ... represent a global order that squares with ... ambitions for freedom and openness and sovereignty and the protection of territorial integrity.”
On the question of the alliance, Indian External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, whose government is one of Russia’s biggest customers for military hardware, emphasized that the Quad partnership was about shared ambitions and “not against somebody.”
Closer view shows troop housing area and a field hospital at Zyabrovka airfield, Belarus, Feb. 10, 2022 (Satellite image ©2022 Maxar Technologies)
Asked by a reporter if Russia had behaved appropriately toward Ukraine, Jaishankar replied that the Quad meeting was focused on the Indo-Pacific region, not Europe.
Blinken earlier said a conflict with China in the Indo-Pacific was not inevitable.
“We share concerns that in recent years China has been acting more aggressively at home and more aggressively in the region and indeed potentially beyond,” Blinken said.
RELATED
A host of scenarios could push China and the United States into some kind of conflict.
The Quad partners are united by an “affirmative vision for what the future can bring” and a “commitment to defend the rules-based system that we have spent tremendous time and effort building,” he added.
Blinken’s trip is designed to reinforce America’s interests in Asia and its intent to push back against increasing Chinese assertiveness in the region. He will also visit Fiji and discuss pressing concerns about North Korea with his Japanese and South Korean counterparts in Hawaii.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry this week accused the United States of using the Quad to force other countries to accept the standards of American democracy.
Australia has suffered trade retaliation in recent years for angering Beijing over actions that include outlawing covert foreign interference in domestic politics, banning Chinese tech giant Huawei from major infrastructure projects and urging an independent investigation into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said he felt reassured by the shared commitment against coercion after meetings with Blinken, Jaishankar and Japanese Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi.
Earlier Friday, Blinken and Hayashi held a meeting in which they expressed “deep concern” about Russia’s beefing up of its military at the Ukrainian border, a Japanese Foreign Ministry official said on condition of anonymity, citing protocol.
The leaders also shared “grave concern” about North Korea’s escalating nuclear and missile development, the official said.
Associated Press writer Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo contributed to this report.
10. Quad ministers address Indo-Pacific 'coercion', climate, COVID
Excerpts:
In a joint statement, they vowed to work on humanitarian relief, disaster assistance and the delivery of infrastructure to the region, and condemned North Korea's "destabilising ballistic missile launches" in violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions.
They said their informal Quad grouping was determined to deepen engagement with regional partners, and increase their capacity to combat unregulated and illegal fishing.
Quad ministers address Indo-Pacific 'coercion', climate, COVID
- Summary
- Quad joint statement alludes to China's regional expansion
- Blinken in Australia to reaffirm US focus on Indo-Pacific
- COVID, climate, cyber, maritime security in Quad's focus
- Quad group includes United States, Australia, Japan, India
MELBOURNE, Feb 11 (Reuters) - The United States, Australia, Japan and India pledged on Friday to deepen cooperation to ensure the Indo-Pacific region was free from "coercion", a thinly veiled swipe at China's economic and military expansion.
Foreign ministers of the so-called Quad group, meeting in the Australian city of Melbourne, also promised to increase cooperation onCOVID-19, cyber threats and counter-terrorism.
In a joint statement, they vowed to work on humanitarian relief, disaster assistanceand the delivery of infrastructure to the region, and condemned North Korea's "destabilising ballistic missile launches" in violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions.
They said their informal Quad grouping was determined to deepen engagement with regional partners, and increase their capacity to combat unregulated and illegal fishing.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken travels onwards to Fiji on Saturday to meet with Pacific island leaders to whom fishing and climate change are likely to be priority issues.
"We agreed to boost maritime security support for Indo Pacific partners to strengthen their maritime domain awareness and ability to develop their offshore resources, to ensure freedom of navigation and overflight and to combat challenges such as illegal fishing," Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne said after the meeting.
The Quad partners "oppose coercive economic policies" that run counter to the World Trade Organization system, "and will work collectively to foster global economic resilience against such actions", the statement said, a reference to China's recent trade boycotts of Australia and Lithuania.
Blinken arrived in Australia this week as Washington grapples with a dangerous standoff with Moscow, which has massed some 100,000 troops near Ukraine’s border and stoked Western fears of an invasion. Russia denies it has such plans.
Asked by reporters on Friday whether confrontation with China in the Indo-Pacific was inevitable, Blinken replied that "nothing is inevitable".
"Having said that, I think we share concerns that in recent years China has been acting more aggressively at home and more aggressively in the region," he said.
China has denounced the Quad as a Cold War construct and a clique "targeting other countries".
Payne said earlier on Friday the Quad's cooperation on the region's COVID response was "most critical", with cyber and maritime security, infrastructure, climate action and disaster relief - especially after the recent Tonga volcanic eruption - also in focus.
The Quad nations have begun holding annual naval exercises across the Indo-Pacific to demonstrate interoperability, and the United States itself conducts freedom of navigation patrols in the South China Sea.
Blinken's trip comes after China and Russia declared last week a "no limits" strategic partnership, their most detailed and assertive statement to work together - and against the United States - to build a new international order based on their own interpretations of human rights and democracy.
U.S.-Chinese relations are at their lowest point in decades with the world's top two economies disagreeing on issues ranging from Hong Kong and Taiwan to the South China Sea and China's treatment of ethnic Muslims.
Biden told Asian leaders in October that the United States would launch talks on a new Indo-Pacific Economic Framework. But few details have emerged and his administration has been reluctant to offer the increased market access Asian countries desire, seeing this as threatening American jobs.
Critics say the lack of U.S. economic engagement is a major weakness in Biden's approach to the region, where China remains the top trading partner for many of the Indo-Pacific nations.
Reporting by Humeyra Pamuk and Kirsty Needham; Editing by Lincoln Feast, Diane Craft and Mark Heinrich
11. ("pre-Quad Statement") Secretary Antony J. Blinken And Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne, Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, And Japanese Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi Before Their Meeting
Secretary Antony J. Blinken And Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne, Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, And Japanese Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi Before Their Meeting - United States Department of State
state.gov · by Antony J. Blinken, Secretary of State
PRIME MINISTER MORRISON: My dear friend Marise, Minister Payne; Minister Jaishankar; Minister Hayashi; can I thank you also, again, Secretary Blinken for being here with us. Yours was the longest distance to travel, but particularly with the other matters that you’re dealing with (inaudible) we’re very appreciative of you making this effort. And so I think on behalf of we Australians, India, and the Japanese, we really do welcome the quality of this partnership and the importance of this partnership to all our partners, and I thank you very much for being here.
We live in a very fragile, fragmented, and contested world, and that is no more accentuated than here in our Indo-Pacific. And the like-minded partners that we see gathered together in this Quad, I always find so incredibly reassuring. I’m reassured by our perspective, I’m reassured by the understanding that was shared between each of us. I’m reassured by the incredible, strong support that Australia has received by our Quad partners. And I just don’t mean in the security context; I mean that in terms of our economic partnership and cooperation. I mean that in our humanitarian partnership. I mean that in terms of how each of us stands for a world order that favors freedom, and particularly here in a free and open Indo-Pacific. And I want to thank you for all of that.
And so while we share this perspective, we look through a lens that very much has our ASEAN partners at the center of our understanding of the Indo-Pacific vision. Australia was the first comprehensive strategic partner of ASEAN, but we all share a deep passion for ASEAN. And our partnership with them, each of us is helping us achieve the many things that we’re working on through the Quad. We sit here in these chairs today, but it was a great thrill to be at the White House with Secretary Blinken and with President Biden, of course, and at that point the former prime minister from Japan, my good friend Yoshi Suga, and now through Fumio, and of course Prime Minister Modi. And here we’re gathered again here in person, and I think that’s tremendous.
And the things we discuss today are principally how we will continue to always stand up for our values, which combine – which is what unites us most.
Secondly, I think in doing so we stand up to those who would seek to coerce us. And as I understand from our Quad partners, none of you (inaudible) understand better than we do, and that is a great comfort to us, that the coercion and the pressure that Australia has been placed under, we greatly appreciate your support.
But we also share a vision for a strong economy, not just regional stability and security, and our engagement in this region, of which we’re so passionate about. Because that gives all nations in the region options and choices and opportunities, and enables their sovereignty to be strengthened and respected. And we are working together on so many shared projects, which is what the Quad is all about – not only, of course, the traditional regional security issues that bound us together, but our shared partnerships on everything from critical minerals, from new technologies, to expanding our markets together and opening our markets, but also on global challenges, whether they be on climate, or on humanitarian issues, or of course the great challenge of COVID (inaudible) and that has led so much of the work that has been important to this Quad partnership.
But finally, I want to end where I referred to earlier. We are great democracies, great liberal democracies who see an economy that is founded on enterprise and innovation, and we support a world order that favors freedom through our international institutions. And it was liberal democracies that provided the framework and the foundation for those important institutions of our world. And we will always work together, I think, to reinforce those, to ensure that all countries can enjoy their own sovereignty and the freedoms of their own (inaudible).
So I thank you very much for being with us today, and (inaudible) particularly for the important discussions that (inaudible).
FOREIGN MINISTER PAYNE: Thanks, Prime Minister, and also my friends and colleagues. What a great pleasure it is to welcome you here to Australia, and particularly for a Quad foreign ministers meeting in person. Minister Jaishankar and I last night were reflecting that we began with an in-person meeting in New York in September of 2019, and notwithstanding COVID we have managed to get to now a fourth meeting of Quad foreign ministers and importantly this summit – very substantive and very consequential undertakings of our four great liberal democracies, as the prime minister said.
Now, we’ve got a big job this afternoon. We have a lot to discuss, and (inaudible) practical cooperation that the prime minister has referred to, but our maritime security, addressing our cyber and critical technologies issues, counter-terrorism, our efforts to work together on climate in the region, and importantly vaccine delivery, where we can now affirm that the Quad as a grouping has delivered over 500 million vaccines of our commitment in the region.
Across the Indo-Pacific, those partnerships are very, very important to our counterparts, and I look forward to a very productive discussions. Thank you all for joining us here.
FOREIGN MINISTER JAISHANKAR: (Inaudible) and it’s really (inaudible) to be here. It’s my first visit to Australia (inaudible). And it’s very appropriate that it should happen for a Quad meeting, and of course we are meeting (inaudible) bilateral (inaudible).
In September, Prime Minister, you, our prime minister, President Biden, the prime minister of Japan – you collectively gave us guidance (inaudible) of the Quad (inaudible). I do want to assure you that (inaudible). (Laughter.) I think today, the meeting gives us an opportunity to review how much we have progressed on that (inaudible). And I’m very confident that the pace, the progress that the Quad has demonstrated the last few years (inaudible).
Since I’m also here for a bilateral, I do want to recognize how much progress we have made (inaudible) Australia. We had the trade ministers in India; I think from my understanding, the discussions there have also been very positive. And part of the reason why I think the Quad has worked so well, so well as a force (inaudible) global good in the Indo-Pacific, is because our bilateral relations (inaudible) bilateral relations (inaudible).
(Inaudible) such a pleasure.
FOREIGN MINISTER HAYASHI: (Via interpreter) I thank you for this precious opportunity today. After this meeting, we will be holding the Quad foreign ministers meeting under the host of Minister Payne, and I would like to thank the initiative of Australia for this extremely timely meeting.
And Prime Minister Kishida is looking forward to hosting the Quad leaders meeting in Japan in the first half of this year.
Prime Minister, we have taken Japan-Australia relations to new heights with the leaders (inaudible) meeting in January and the signing of the Reciprocal Access Agreement. The Prime Minister Kishida hopes to further develop our bilateral relations, and wishes to continue to closely coordinate with you. Thank you so much.
SECRETARY BLINKEN: Prime Minister, the risk of going last is that everything’s already been said. (Laughter.) (Inaudible) say first of all, very warm greetings from President Biden to you. And we appreciate not just your hospitality in bringing us together, but your leadership in advancing the Quad over these past months, and demonstrating that our four democracies coming together can produce constructive, concrete results for all of our people – indeed, beyond. The vaccines that Marise was talking about is just the most powerful example, but the agenda that you’ve given us through the last leaders meeting and one that we intend to carry forward today to continue to demonstrate that we’re producing good results for our people, because ultimately that’s what it’s all about.
I would just say that I think what’s so striking to me as we get together is that this is a group of countries brought together not by what we’re against, but what we’re for. And what we’re for, quite simply, is a free and open Indo-Pacific, the most dynamic region in the world with the fastest growing economies, half the world’s population. People deserve to live freely. Countries deserve to have the freedom to work together and associate with whom they choose. And together, we can demonstrate that we are effective in bringing benefits to all of our people. That’s the spirit that we’re conducting this in, and we’re grateful for Australia’s leadership.
PRIME MINISTER MORRISON: Thank you, Mr. Secretary. I think we will have one or two questions.
QUESTION: Mr. Secretary —
PRIME MINISTER MORRISON: They’re all very polite. (Laughter.) I can assure you that that’s not a habit I’ve often observed. (Laughter.) Here they are. You’ve got them on their best behavior.
QUESTION: Mr. Secretary, do you feel that a confrontation with China in the Indo-Pacific is inevitable?
SECRETARY BLINKEN: Nothing is inevitable. I think that’s – well, maybe the only thing that’s inevitable in life is death and taxes, as has often been said. But beyond that, no. And having said that, I think we share concerns that in recent years China has been acting more repressively at home and more aggressively in the region, and indeed potentially beyond. But as I said, what brings us together, what unites us, is an affirmative vision for what the future can bring, but also a commitment to defend the rules-based system that we have spent tremendous time and effort building over these many years, wherever it’s – and by whomever it’s found.
So that’s what we’re focused on. And I think again the relationship for all of us with China is among the most consequential and the most complex of any we have. I’ll let my colleagues speak to (inaudible). But again, what brings us together is very much about the future that we’re for and that we’re trying to build together.
QUESTION: Prime Minister Morrison, Secretary Blinken was speaking just before about leadership. Are you concerned or frustrated that you were rolled in your own cabinet regarding the religious discrimination bill?
PRIME MINISTER MORRISON: There’ll be a time and a place to talk about those issues. But I think the context, frankly, of what these foreign ministers are coming together today to focus on, that (inaudible) could not be, I think, put in the same league. What we’re talking about here is a world that we have not seen like this for about 80 years. And we are working together to seek to shape a peaceful environment where all the countries in our region that we work with so closely can enjoy their sovereignty, to not be coerced, to be able to pursue their hopes and aspirations for them and their people.
Just this week the foreign minister and I met with the foreign minister of Lithuania, and we stand with them. They understand what’s going on, like those sitting around here today understand what’s going on. And it’s incredibly important that our plan as a government, as a country, has been to seek to work with as many like-minded nations as we possibly can. And that like-mindedness doesn’t always necessarily relate to how our systems are governed, but a like-mindedness about an open and independent Indo-Pacific, a like-mindedness about free trade, and the opportunity to have human rights observed in our region, and to address the global challenges of COVID and climate.
There’s like-mindedness across many things. But the like-mindedness that unites the four of us is a like-mindedness built on being the most successful liberal democracies and, indeed, the largest now in India’s case. And that is how we will continue to pursue the discussions today.
QUESTION: Ministers, do you anticipate that you’ll discuss events in Ukraine? And Dr. Jaishankar, can I please ask you, sir, what’s India’s current view of Russia’s actions in Ukraine, and do you believe that Russia has behaved appropriately?
FOREIGN MINISTER JAISHANKAR: I – this meeting is focused on the Indo-Pacific, so I’m sure you understand geography.
PRIME MINISTER MORRISON: Dr. Jaishankar, just —
QUESTION: Thank you. Thank you, sir.
FOREIGN MINISTER JAISHANKAR: This meeting is focused on the Indo-Pacific, so I think you should figure out the geography there. And where we stand, our position on Ukraine, we have laid it out in public at the UN Security Council.
PRIME MINISTER MORRISON: Okay. Thanks very much.
state.gov · by Antony J. Blinken, Secretary of State
12. A Rival of America’s Making? The Debate Over Washington’s China Strategy
A Rival of America’s Making?
The Debate Over Washington’s China Strategy
March/April 2022
The Real Liberal Bet
G. John Ikenberry
Most observers would agree with John Mearsheimer that the liberal bet on China did not work out (“The Inevitable Rivalry,” November/December 2021). Welcoming the country into the world economy after the Cold War did not cause it to open up, liberalize, and become a responsible stakeholder in the global order. Worse, under President Xi Jinping, the country has taken a dangerous autocratic and illiberal turn. But Mearsheimer goes further, arguing that the United States’ strategy of engagement with China ranks as one of its worst foreign policy disasters and that an alternative strategy, containment, would have prevented or at least delayed the emergence of China as a threat.
What Mearsheimer misses is that U.S. policy toward China was just one piece of a broader approach that sought to strengthen the foundations of the American-led liberal international order after the Cold War, a strategy that brought considerably more benefits than costs. Building on a long tradition of order building, the United States pushed and pulled the international system in a direction that broadly aligned with its interests and values, promulgating rules and institutions to foster liberal democracy, expanding security cooperation with European and East Asian allies, and generating international coalitions for tackling the gravest threats to humanity.
Abandoning this strategy once China started to rise would have put the United States in a dramatically worse position not just globally but also in terms of countering China. In Mearsheimer’s world, the United States would have fewer allies and partners. And it would face a China with accrued enmity and grievances in a global order that was less stable and prosperous—and less capable of generating the cooperation needed to grapple with the problems of the twenty-first century.
THE TRIUMPH OF THE ORDER
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the last great alternative to the U.S.-led liberal order suddenly disappeared, and countries clamored to join the free world. The proportion of democracies more than doubled, rising from under 30 percent of all countries in the early 1980s to almost 60 percent in the first decade of the twenty-first century. NATO and the European Union expanded. Regional free-trade agreements proliferated, and in 1995, the World Trade Organization was created. The United States presided over an expanding global system that was creating more wealth, security, and glimmers of social justice than had been seen in any previous era. This was the overarching liberal bet, and it was a world-historical success. U.S. officials obviously hoped that China would become a stakeholder in this expanding order, but that was never the main purpose. The far more important goal was to build a liberal-oriented international order dominated by the United States and its allies.
The brand of realism that Mearsheimer is offering as a guide to confronting China simply could not see, explain, or appreciate this accomplishment. When the Cold War ended, Mearsheimer and other leading realists argued that the U.S.-led alliance system would unravel. “The Soviet threat provides the glue that holds NATO together,” Mearsheimer observed in The Atlantic in 1990. “Take away that offensive threat and the United States is likely to abandon the Continent; the defensive alliance it has headed for forty years may well then disintegrate, bringing an end to the bipolar order that has kept the peace of Europe for the past forty-five years.” But the opposite occurred in both Europe and East Asia. The Soviet threat disappeared, and yet the U.S. alliance system survived, and solidarity among liberal democracies deepened.
Thirty years after the end of the Cold War, many realists, including Mearsheimer, are again voicing questions about U.S. alliances and, under the banner of “offshore balancing,” arguing for a smaller American security footprint in the world. In their view, Washington should focus on defending the Western Hemisphere, while playing a more limited, backup role in protecting allies in Europe and East Asia. But U.S. retrenchment would surely be an invitation for China and Russia to extend their imperial reach, heralding a return to a realist world with a familiar and tragic logic to it. As China grows more powerful, everyone should be grateful that the United States did not follow Mearsheimer’s realist script.
CONGAGEMENT
Mearsheimer also fails to appreciate that U.S. strategy toward China was always about more than just engagement. Across the post–Cold War administrations, the United States did seek to draw China into the global order. After all, Beijing was already inside—a member of the UN Security Council and a host of other regional and global bodies, including, from 1992 on, the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. But there were two other components to this U.S. strategy.
First, Washington built counterweights to Chinese power through an invigorated and deepened alliance system in East Asia. The Clinton administration renewed the U.S.-Japanese alliance and redefined the security pact as a force for stability, a feat that surely ranks as one of the great accomplishments in post–Cold War U.S. foreign policy. In a 1995 article in these pages, the political scientist Joseph Nye, then serving in the Pentagon and reflecting the thinking of the Clinton administration, noted “the rise of Chinese power” and made the case for a strategy of “deep engagement” in East Asia. It was not altogether obvious that the United States would stay in the region after the Cold War or remain a security provider there through the forward deployment of its forces. But the case was made, and deep engagement remains at the core of U.S. strategy to this day.
The second part of the U.S. strategy was to strengthen regional institutions in the broader Asia-Pacific region. Looking beyond the traditional boundaries of East Asia, Washington worked with Australia, India, and the Americas to bolster the Asia-Pacific’s security and economic architecture, the idea being that a larger region would be more open and less dominated by China. Given these efforts, it is not surprising that many observers in the 1990s—including, one might note, many Chinese—referred to U.S. policy toward China as “congagement,” a mix of containment and engagement.
U.S. retrenchment would surely be an invitation for China and Russia to extend their imperial reach.
The major failure of U.S. strategy toward China was to not make the country’s integration into the liberal capitalist system more conditional. During the Cold War, the liberal order was a club, a sort of mutual aid society in which members embraced liberal democratic principles in return for access to the Western-oriented system of trade and security. After the Cold War ended, this logic of conditionality broke down. The liberal order became more like a shopping mall, in which states could pick and choose which aspects of the order to buy into. China joined and benefited from parts of the order, such as favorable trade terms, while ignoring others, such as the commitment to human rights, the rule of law, and openness. Mearsheimer writes that “U.S. leaders should have negotiated a new bilateral trade agreement that imposed harsher terms on China.” But such conditionality would have required a strong and unified liberal order—not his realist world of divided and competing states.
Mearsheimer argues that the United States, beyond demanding more of China on trade, should have pursued something more radical: a post–Cold War grand strategy aimed at systematically limiting Chinese economic
growth and power. In his counterfactual history, the United States would have sought to keep China weak, poor, and peripheral. But there are reasons to doubt that such an alternative course was desirable—or even possible.
For one thing, the American public was unlikely to have supported a grand strategy of, in effect, putting a boot on China’s throat. Most Americans would have found this policy politically offensive and morally suspect. Many would also have wondered what Chinese threat demanded this illiberal realpolitik. Even realists at the time were not seized by the idea of China as a future peer competitor. In 1992, for example, a quintessentially realist report, written by advisers to Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and leaked to the press, argued that the United States’ mission in the new era was to ensure that no rival superpower emerged in Europe or Asia—yet it identified Germany and Japan, not China, as the potential future challengers to U.S. leadership.
Washington should help to strengthen liberal democracy while looking for opportunities to work with its chief rival.
The problems with Mearsheimer’s counterfactual go beyond this. Full-throttle containment of China would have required allies and partners that were willing to cooperate. In all likelihood, however, other states would have calculated correctly that China was not a threat to them in the way that it might have been to the United States. Just as important, the U.S. government itself would have found it impossible to sustain a decades-long strategy of containment. Pursuing that path would have required a unified political class, business community, and foreign policy elite—all of which seem fanciful at best. Mearsheimer has long voiced deep misgivings about the ability of liberal democracies to soberly pursue their long-term national interests. Imagining that the United States could have done so to prevent a power transition that is, even now, decades in the future—and that might not even happen—is a bit rich. Yet in his article, Mearsheimer suggests that such a careful and coherent grand strategy not only was possible but also could have been sustained for generations.
Were it somehow pursued, Mearsheimer’s strategy would have been an act of national self-harm. Containment would have left the United States and its partners more divided and the liberal international order in greater disarray. The United States would have lost out economically to other states that benefited from trade with China. Its reputation as a global leader would have been weakened, perhaps irreparably. And ultimately, the strategy would have failed to prevent the rise of China. Worse, China would have emerged from this failed effort at containment more powerful, more aggrieved, and more disconnected from liberal internationalist principles and norms. In Mearsheimer’s counterfactual world, the United States would be getting even less cooperation from China than it gets today, precisely at a moment when cascading planetary threats, such as global warming, health pandemics, cyberwar, and nuclear proliferation, require more cooperation.
Mearsheimer is right that China presents a formidable challenge to the United States. The two countries are hegemonic rivals with antagonistic visions of world order. One wants to make the world safe for democracy; the other wants to make the world safe for autocracy. The United States believes—as it has for more than two centuries—that it is safer in a world where liberal democracies hold sway. China increasingly contests such a world, and therein lies the grand strategic rub. But in the face of this challenge, the United States would do well to work with its allies to strengthen liberal democracy and the global system that makes it safe—and to do so while looking for opportunities to work with its chief rival.
G. JOHN IKENBERRY is Albert G. Milbank Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University and a Global Scholar at Kyung Hee University, in South Korea.
The China Threat in Perspective
Andrew J. Nathan
John Mearsheimer is right to look at the fundamentals of demographics, geography, and the structure of the international system to assess the threat China poses to U.S. interests. In his view, China’s massive population will make the country almost twice as wealthy as the United States by 2050, the absence of a clear geographic dividing line in Asia between rival camps makes war more “thinkable” than during the Cold War, and China’s lack of allies will give it “greater flexibility to cause trouble abroad.” As the power balance shifts, “China is acting exactly as realism would predict,” he writes. “Who can blame Chinese leaders for seeking to dominate Asia and become the most powerful state on the planet?”
But a proper understanding of these factors does not lead to the dire forecast Mearsheimer provides. In each area, China suffers from major weaknesses. It will not become, as he says it wants to, “the most powerful state in its backyard and, eventually, in the world.” Rather, it will remain one among several major powers both regionally and globally, presenting threats to important, but not existential, U.S. interests.
THE SOURCES OF POWER
China’s demographic structure is full of problems. For one thing, Beijing must build a modern nation-state within the boundaries of a traditional multiethnic empire. It inherited from the Qing dynasty 55 officially recognized “national minorities” that occupy strategic territories around the rim of the Han Chinese heartland. Among these, the Kazakh, Mongolian, Tibetan, and Uyghur ethnic groups are severely alienated from central rule and present a continuing problem of domestic security and territorial integrity, despite the extreme measures Beijing is taking to assimilate them.
In the Han heartland, China’s population is aging and will start shrinking sometime in the next decade. With an economic growth rate that has declined since the go-go years of the 1990s and the following decade and is likely to fall further as its economy matures, China is unlikely to reach even half the United States’ per capita income by 2050—the more modest of the scenarios Mearsheimer envisions in his article. Meanwhile, the government is under pressure to provide better living standards to the growing middle class and to aspirant rural dwellers and the working class. That is why a 2015 Chinese law defined national security primarily in domestic terms, as “the relative absence of international or domestic threats to the state’s power to govern, sovereignty, unity and territorial integrity, the welfare of the people, sustainable economic and social development, and other major national interests.” And it is why in 2017, Chinese President Xi Jinping identified the “principal contradiction” facing his government as that “between unbalanced and inadequate development and the people’s ever-growing needs for a better life.”
On the outskirts of Beijing, July 2021
Tingshu Wang / Reuters
The country’s geographic position is also unfavorable. Along its land and sea borders, China confronts distrustful neighbors. Among them are seven of the 15 most populous countries in the world (India, Indonesia, Japan, Pakistan, the Philippines, Russia, and Vietnam) and five countries with which China has fought wars within the past 80 years (India, Japan, Russia, South Korea, and Vietnam). None of China’s neighbors is culturally Chinese or ideologically aligned with the Chinese Communist Party. All may cooperate with China at various times and to varying degrees for strategic or economic reasons, but all seek to hedge against Chinese domination, often by cultivating relations with the United States. As Chinese behavior has become more assertive, this counterbalancing behavior is growing more evident. India has compromised its traditional strategic autonomy in order to participate in joint military exercises with Australia, Japan, and the United States as part of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, known as the Quad. Japan has taken the unprecedented step of officially declaring stability in the Taiwan Strait to be a national interest. And Australia has reaffirmed its U.S. alliance by accepting help in acquiring nuclear-powered submarines under the 2021 AUKUS agreement. China is unlikely to achieve anything like hegemony over any but the smallest of its neighbors.
Geography helps explain another Chinese weakness: its lack of allies other than North Korea. There are countries that are nearby enough to receive substantial help from China in the case of a military conflict, but they all fear China more than they fear any other state. The lack of allies is more a liability than an asset, for it deprives China of ways to multiply the pressure it can put on uncooperative neighbors and of the ability to position sizable military forces around the world. To be sure, none of the United States’ 60-some allies and partners has interests identical to Washington’s. None can be counted on to follow every component of U.S. strategy toward China. But U.S. alliances and partnerships still complicate China’s military calculations, increase the pressure on Beijing to comply with the international norms preferred by other states, and expand the alternatives available to countries considering whether to accept Chinese investments.
Nor is the structural distribution of international power favorable to Chinese global dominance. Barring catastrophic mismanagement by other states, China will continue to face five powerful rivals—India, Japan, Russia, the United States, and the European Union—in a multipolar system that is not going to disappear. A unipolar moment, if one ever really existed, cannot be re-created, not by the United States and certainly not by China.
THREAT PERCEPTION
The challenge the United States faces from China is bad enough without exaggerating it. As realism would predict, Beijing is dissatisfied with the status quo: it is closely hemmed in by Washington’s allies, partners, and military forces; its supply lines are vulnerable to U.S. interdiction; and its society is influenced by American culture. China wants to push the United States away from its shores and weaken its alliances, and this means a real chance of conflict, especially over Taiwan. I agree with Mearsheimer that if such a war occurred, it would probably be a limited war, albeit highly destructive and tragic. I also agree that it would have the potential—not a great one, but more than zero—to escalate to a nuclear exchange.
But Mearsheimer is wrong to describe China’s determination to gain control over Taiwan as either “emotional” or “expansionist,” because these descriptors make China sound irrationally aggressive. Mearsheimer’s own theory of realism better explains why Beijing will not lose its appetite for Taiwan, given the long-standing legal basis of its sovereignty claim and the island’s strategic, economic, and technological importance to Chinese security. Also consistent with realism is China’s preference for avoiding a premature strike on Taiwan and instead deterring Taiwanese independence as long as it takes to achieve what Beijing calls “peaceful reunification.” But deterring Taiwanese independence has meant that China has had to build up military assets capable of threatening the aircraft carriers and forward air and naval bases that the United States has long relied on to stave off any attempt to take Taiwan by force. The result: a U.S.-Chinese arms race that raises the risk of war through miscalculation.
Overestimating the China threat is just as dangerous as underestimating it.
And Mearsheimer is wrong to describe Beijing’s goal as global dominance. In a multipolar world, China will seek to shape global institutions to its advantage, just as major powers have always done. But it has no proposal for an alternative, Beijing-dominated set of institutions. It remains strongly committed to the global free-trade regime, as well as to the UN and that organization’s alphabet soup of agencies. It participates actively in the UN human rights system in order to help its allies and frustrate its rivals. Its Belt and Road Initiative operates alongside, rather than in place of, long-standing Western-funded development programs. China seeks influence, but it has little prospect of dominance as long as other powers also stay active in these institutions.
Overestimating the China threat is just as dangerous as underestimating it. Hyping the hazard makes it harder to manage, by creating panic among both the American public and Chinese policymakers. Whether or not engagement was the mistake that Mearsheimer claims, whether or not there was ever an option to constrain China’s growth as he believes, we are where we are. I agree with Mearsheimer that what the United States must do now is manage the situation—which should mean not exacerbating what is already, on cold realist grounds, a serious challenge.
ANDREW J. NATHAN is Class of 1919 Professor of Political Science at Columbia University.
The Barriers to War
Susan Thornton
John Mearsheimer’s article engenders a sense of foreboding and doom. “Engagement may have been the worst strategic blunder any country has made in recent history,” he writes. As a result, “China and the United States are locked in what can only be called a new cold war. . . . And this cold war is more likely to turn hot.”
I cannot agree that the U.S. policy of engaging China was a major strategic blunder. During the Cold War, that policy succeeded at convincing China to stop sponsoring communist revolutions in East Asia and helped counter the Soviet Union. After the Cold War ended, engagement enabled massive economic growth in China that lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese out of poverty—a significant reason that the share of people worldwide living in extreme poverty, by the World Bank’s definition, fell from 36 percent in 1990 to 12 percent in 2015. Surely, this counts as a major human achievement.
What would be a strategic blunder, however, is whatever series of missteps might lead to a military conflict between China and the United States. Mearsheimer argues that structural factors are inexorably leading to such a conflict. But his realist view of the situation disregards modern international realities.
For a war to break out between China and the United States, the international system would have to fail.
There are a number of formidable restraints in place to keep the peace. The United States has worked hard over the decades to build these barriers—often as part of the very engagement strategy that Mearsheimer criticizes. These bulwarks have helped preserve peace and promote prosperity for the last 70 years, and they are still strong enough to prevent a U.S.-Chinese conflict. Although accidents or incidents connected to military brinkmanship may occur, they would almost certainly not lead to a wider war. That would require something exceedingly unlikely: the simultaneous failure of every restraint.
First, bilateral diplomacy would have to break down. Engagement is the opposite of estrangement, which describes the absence of U.S.-Chinese relations from 1949 to 1972. The purpose of engagement is to forestall misperceptions, provide reassurance, and prevent conflict. It is true that diplomacy and communication between China and the United States have been anemic for the past five years. And it is difficult to discern authoritative policy amid the current cacophony of diplomatic posturing on Twitter and elsewhere, creating an environment ripe for confusion and overreaction. But these deficiencies are not structural; they can be remedied. If top-level leaders in both countries consistently communicate and work to reduce public posturing, as they should, then the diplomatic barriers to war can be reinforced.
For a war to break out, the international system would also have to fail. China and the United States are connected to a global network of countries and institutions that have a stake—in some cases, an existential stake—in preventing conflict between these two countries. Almost every government and institution on the globe would be grievously damaged by a U.S.-Chinese war, and so they all would try to prevent an imminent conflict through diplomatic pressure, mediation, or acts of resistance, such as denying overflight and basing rights. Critics may be quick to deny the influence of others in heading off a major-power clash. But in the current international system, there is no way for either side to emerge victorious, and those outside China and the United States would see this most clearly.
Then there is the restraint created by globalization. Mearsheimer argues that it was a catastrophic mistake for the United States to help China grow wealthy, as its resulting strength will inevitably lead it to challenge the United States. But it is also plausible that the inextricably integrated nature of the global economy, and specifically of the Chinese and U.S. economies, makes any war unwinnable and thus acts as a deterrent to conflict. It is true, as critics will point out, that economic dependencies failed to prevent World War I. But the economic relations of the early twentieth century were nothing like the complex entanglements of today’s international economic system. In the case of China and the United States, they create a situation of mutual assured economic destruction.
China and the United States are not prisoners of history.
Another restraint is public opinion, at least on the U.S. side. Politicians in the United States respond to various incentives, but they cannot ignore the sentiments of their voters. And after a 20-year fight against terrorism, the American public is decidedly wary of protracted and costly overseas conflicts. If U.S. policymakers appeared poised for a conflict with China, one would also expect that the press, having learned its lesson from the war in Iraq, would perform its watchdog function, question the official narratives, and activate public concern.
All these barriers should work to prevent a conflict. But if they somehow didn’t, there is a final fail-safe that is even harder to imagine not working: military deterrence. Taiwan is the most likely issue over which a U.S.-Chinese war could break out. But the quantity and quality of the weaponry on both sides translates to certain catastrophic losses for all, which should provide a sufficient deterrent to war. And because the devastation of a conflict over Taiwan would spiral out of control quickly, one cannot rule out the use of nuclear weapons. Strange as it may sound, that is good news: just as the nuclear age prevented direct military conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States for more than 40 years, so it should between China and the United States, both of which are nuclear-armed powers with survivable second-strike capabilities. Although China has many fewer missiles and warheads than the United States—something China is working on remedying—the doctrine of mutually assured destruction still operates. The balance of terror holds.
Looking through this list of potential failures, one might find cause for pessimism, given that each restraint has seen its share of erosion in recent years. But China and the United States are not prisoners of history. The two countries will find that they cannot escape one another, and eventually, they will have to seek accommodation. This may now seem a distant vision, but it is a far more likely outcome, given the countervailing currents, than an apocalyptic war.
SUSAN THORNTON is a Senior Fellow at the Paul Tsai China Center at Yale Law School. From 1991 to 2018, she was a career diplomat at the U.S. State Department, most recently serving as Acting Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs.
In Search of a Strategy
Sun Zhe
In John Mearsheimer’s view, China is on a single-minded quest to dominate the United States, and therefore conflict between the two powers is all but inevitable. But this argument rests on a misreading of what Beijing wants. In reality, China is in the midst of a process of soul-searching, with multiple perspectives inside the country on the future of U.S.-Chinese relations. China’s thinking is not monolithic, and its strategic direction is not preordained.
There are a number of Chinese views on relations with the United States. One is that due to domestic constraints, the two countries will inevitably grow apart and decouple, at least in key areas such as science and technology. Another is that Washington is determined to contain Beijing and diminish its power, making compromise impossible and cooperation futile. Still another view emphasizes the confrontational nature of interactions between the two countries and sees a decisive battle on the horizon for which China must prepare, in part by working more closely with Iran, North Korea, Russia, and even Taliban-led Afghanistan. These overlapping perspectives share a sense of pessimism and hostility. They all reflect a zero-sum mindset.
Mearsheimer sees this type of thinking as guiding Chinese policy. But there is in fact another, contrary outlook that he ignores. This position still holds out hope for productive relations with Washington. As Chinese President Xi Jinping said himself in 2017, “There are a thousand reasons to make the China-U.S. relationship work, and no reason to break it.” Qin Gang, the Chinese ambassador to the United States, has repeated this message, saying in July 2021 that cooperation was “the call of the times and the will of the people.” He added, “China and the United States are entering a new round of mutual exploration, understanding, and adaptation, trying to find a way to get along with each other in the new era.” In this optimistic view, bilateral ties can be sustained, even in the most antagonistic moments.
Biden speaks virtually with Xi, Washington, D.C., November 2021
Jonathan Ernst / Reuters
The debate over China’s strategy toward the United States will continue. Some Chinese media figures and policy practitioners are advocating a much firmer line, but most mainstream strategic advisers are insisting on a more accommodating policy. Indeed, Xi and the rest of the current Chinese leadership are decidedly cautious. They have generally refrained from openly criticizing American leaders, especially the president. (In August 2020, Beijing did sanction 11 U.S. politicians and leaders of pro-democratic organizations who had denounced China, but the group was carefully selected, and the sanctions came only after Washington imposed restrictions on an equal number of Chinese officials.) China’s leaders understand that their country will suffer greatly if a sweet relationship goes sour, if win-win gives way to mutual destruction. Inside Chinese diplomatic circles, this policy for handling the relationship with the United States even has a slogan: “Criticize but don’t alienate; fight over core interests but don’t break the relationship.”
Engagement, which Mearsheimer spends much of his article criticizing, can take some of the credit for this pacifistic strain of Chinese thinking. He may call it “a risky policy,” but the bet paid off. Engagement modernized China to an extraordinary degree. The policy slashed the number of China’s poor and generated in their place a large cosmopolitan and increasingly liberal-minded middle class. Domestically, this middle class overwhelmingly prizes such values as freedom and property rights; on foreign policy, it prefers peace and negotiation. Although this group does not have the power to direct China’s future, the leadership cannot afford to ignore it entirely. And its influence in China will only diminish if the U.S.-Chinese relationship becomes more hostile.
China’s thinking is not monolithic, and its strategic direction is not preordained.
Mearsheimer views China as robotically destined for war: once you wind it up, it will march toward power expansion. China’s power, its nationalism, and its lack of allies that might restrain it, he says, will lead the country to try to revise the status quo abroad. But this portrayal of Chinese intentions neglects the fact that engagement with Western countries, especially the United States, helped China integrate into the world system. Given China’s emphasis on sovereignty and negotiation, it is more accurate to call the country a conservative, status quo power. It is the United States, in contrast, that has shown itself to be revisionist. The country tried to export democracy to Afghanistan and Iraq. In Asia, it is now seeking to encircle China by forging the aukus security pact with Australia and the United Kingdom and reinvigorating the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or Quad, with Australia, India, and Japan. Mearsheimer is wrong to see China as a growing hegemon whose only goal is to challenge the United States. Rather, China sees itself as a victim of bullying. As a rising, but not fully risen, power, it has by no means given up hopes of coexisting and even cooperating with the United States within the current international system.
Mearsheimer’s prescriptions are as wrong-headed as his diagnosis. Since the source of U.S.-Chinese competition is “structural,” he writes, “the problem cannot be eliminated with clever policymaking.” He concludes that “at best, this rivalry can be managed in the hope of avoiding a war.” Then he offers two pieces of advice to Washington: “maintain formidable conventional forces in East Asia to persuade Beijing that a clash of arms would at best yield a Pyrrhic victory” and “work to establish clear rules of the road for waging this security competition—for example, agreements to avoid incidents at sea or other accidental military clashes.” The first recommendation assumes that China can be deterred from starting a war; the second, that China will be rational enough to follow a clear code of conduct. If Mearsheimer is convinced that these policies offer the best way out of the U.S.-Chinese rivalry, then he is essentially arguing that with wise leadership and rational decision-making on both sides, the worst outcomes can be prevented. Therefore, contrary to what he claims, structure alone does not determine the future; agency also matters.
Instead of subscribing to Mearsheimer’s gloomy view of U.S.-Chinese relations, Washington should recognize that those relations can be characterized by decency, understanding, and pragmatism. The Biden administration appears to grasp this. As Secretary of State Antony Blinken put it in 2021, “Our relationship with China will be competitive when it should be, collaborative when it can be, and adversarial when it must be.” Mearsheimer may criticize this policy as naive and dovish, just as he has done with engagement. But the history of U.S.-Chinese relations has shown that leaders in both countries need not be enchained by structural forces. Whether voluntarily or through pressure, they can choose cooperation over conflict.
SUN ZHE is Co-Director of the China Initiative at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of State Governance Studies at Peking University.
Mearsheimer Replies
It is good to see John Ikenberry acknowledge that engagement failed abysmally: in his words, China and the United States are now “hegemonic rivals with antagonistic visions of world order.” Unable to defend engagement with China, he instead focuses on the broader policy of liberal hegemony that U.S. policymakers pursued during the so-called unipolar moment. He maintains, oddly, that “it was a world-historical success.”
The facts do not support that claim. Consider the U.S. position in the world today compared to in 1990. Back then, the United States was the sole great power on the planet; today, it faces two hostile and dangerous great powers, China and Russia. The liberal international order that Ikenberry has championed for decades is in tatters. U.S. policy in the greater Middle East has failed at almost every turn and has caused an enormous amount of death and destruction. Democracy, which appeared to be on the march after the Cold War, is now in retreat. Worse, American democracy is under siege, in part thanks to the excesses and failures of liberal hegemony. Ikenberry tells us that the United States “is safer in a world where liberal democracies hold sway.” But the policies he has long endorsed have undermined democracy at home and abroad, making the country less safe by his logic.
Ikenberry mischaracterizes my views on containment, claiming that I would have preferred that the United States try “to keep China weak, poor, and peripheral.” But I have never made that case, since this would have been an unrealistic goal; China was always destined to grow economically. What I actually argued was that Washington should have sought to slow the country’s growth, not only to delay the day it became a great power but also to make sure it never became a peer competitor.
Ikenberry is correct when he says that containment was not a viable option, given that it was opposed by U.S. allies and partners and by figures within the United States, including the foreign policy elite. That was precisely my point: the U.S. foreign policy establishment was enamored with engagement and had no time for realist arguments. I believe, however, that if U.S. leaders had been committed to realism, they could have fashioned an effective containment policy that would have enjoyed substantial support at home and abroad. Contra Ikenberry’s view, a powerful China poses an even greater threat to its Asian neighbors than it does to the United States.
Washington should have sought to slow China's growth.
Before dismissing containment as infeasible and saying that it “would have been an act of national self-harm,” Ikenberry claims the United States actually pursued “a mix of containment and engagement” of China. This policy of “congagement,” he writes, is exemplified by Joseph Nye’s 1995 article in these pages about “deep engagement” in East Asia, a strategy Ikenberry portrays as synonymous with deep containment. Problems abound with this argument. First, Ikenberry cannot logically maintain that containment was both politically impossible and a central element of U.S. policy. Second, engagement and containment are not complementary strategies: engagement accepts that the global balance of power will shift in China’s favor as that country develops, a stance that is directly at odds with containment. Third, U.S. policymakers invariably rejected containment—as Nye himself clearly did in the article Ikenberry cites. “It is wrong to portray China as an enemy,” Nye wrote. “A containment strategy would be difficult to reverse,” he added. “Enmity would become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The Clinton administration’s policy of engagement is a far better approach to dealing with emerging Chinese power.”
Ikenberry claims that as an advocate of “offshore balancing,” I have little use for allies and believe that “Washington should focus on defending the Western Hemisphere, while playing a more limited, backup role in protecting allies in Europe and East Asia.” I have never made that argument with respect to East Asia. On the contrary, I have long held that the United States has no choice but to directly confront China—including by defending Taiwan—and that it must work closely with its allies to contain China’s rise.
Lastly, Ikenberry’s recommendations for how to deal with a powerful China suggest he has learned little from recent experience. Having begun his response by acknowledging that engagement failed, he ends it by recommending that the United States focus on “looking for opportunities to work with its chief rival.” Been there, done that. The results speak for themselves.
WHAT CHINA WANTS
Andrew Nathan focuses less on engagement than on how U.S.-Chinese strategic competition is evolving. He worries that I am “hyping” the China threat and “creating panic.” He does not say China is a paper tiger, but he leans in that direction. Specifically, he maintains that the country “suffers from major weaknesses” and is not going to become a regional hegemon, much less the most powerful state in the world.
I never said China was in fact going to dominate Asia or attain global primacy. Rather, I argued that as China grows more powerful, it will try to achieve those goals. In response, the United States and its allies will go to great lengths to contain China, as they did with imperial Germany, imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union. Whether China succeeds remains to be seen. Regardless, the ensuing competition between Beijing and Washington is likely to be more dangerous than Nathan seems to think.
Taiwan is a case in point. Nathan recognizes that as China tries “to push the United States away from its shores and weaken its alliances,” there will be “a real chance of conflict, especially over Taiwan.” But he sees Taiwan from a purely realist perspective, rejecting my argument that nationalism might help fuel a conflict over Taiwan on the grounds that my characterization makes “China sound irrationally aggressive.” In fact, Beijing views Taiwan as sacred territory and is deeply committed to making it part of China. Japan and the United States stand in the way, however, which antagonizes many Chinese and makes the likelihood of conflict over that island greater than realist logic alone would predict.
The United States is China’s only great-power rival.
Then there is Nathan’s claim that “China suffers from major weaknesses” that will severely hamper its efforts to dominate Asia. China does confront several challenges, but Nathan overstates them. It does contain numerous minority groups, for example, but 92 percent of its population is Han Chinese, and there is little evidence that ethnic unrest is sapping Chinese power. Nathan claims that China operates in a multipolar world in which it faces “five powerful rivals.” But the European Union is not a country, India and Japan are not great powers, and Russia is not an adversary. The United States is China’s only great-power rival. Of course, China will have to contend with a U.S.-led balancing coalition that includes India and Japan, but that is a far cry from facing five great powers well positioned to stop it from achieving regional hegemony. Making the situation even more favorable to China is the fact that India, Japan, and the United States are thousands of miles apart, which will impair their ability to work together to contain China. Moreover, China is not as friendless as Nathan portrays it to be: the country has fostered increasingly friendly relations with two of its most powerful neighbors, Pakistan and Russia.
The most serious difficulty Nathan identifies is China’s aging population, but it is hard to know what its effects will be in the foreseeable future. Beijing will surely turn to automation to mitigate the problem, which anyway will take a few decades to have a significant impact. Also, many of China’s competitors are dealing with similar demographic challenges, including Japan, South Korea, and even the United States to some extent. Nathan argues that China’s economy is likely to slow down markedly moving forward, and he may be right, but it is difficult to know how much that economy will grow in the next few decades (and how the U.S. economy will perform over that same period). After all, few experts predicted China’s spectacular growth over the past 30 years. But even if the country’s economy grows more slowly than it has in recent years, it will still be enormously powerful and will provide Beijing with the military wherewithal to cause its neighbors and the United States much trouble.
THE ODDS OF WAR
Susan Thornton disagrees with my categorization of engagement after the Cold War as a serious “strategic blunder,” arguing that the policy “lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese out of poverty,” which is “a major human achievement.” I agree, but that accomplishment has little to do with the security of the United States, which is the issue on the table. Thornton never explains why a policy that hastened the emergence of a formidable peer competitor was not, from the U.S. perspective, a colossal misstep.
Thornton recognizes that China and the United States are now engaged in an intense security competition—which makes one wonder why she has no reservations about the policy of engagement that got us here. It may be because she is not worried that the rivalry will lead to war, arguing that “there are a number of formidable restraints in place to keep the peace.” She maintains that in contrast I believe that the rivalry is “inexorably leading” to “an apocalyptic war.” But I did not say that war is inevitable. Indeed, I emphasized that war is unlikely. After describing the different ways fighting might break out, I wrote, “None of this is to say that these limited-war scenarios are likely.” To be clear, I recognize that there are significant barriers to armed conflict. Those barriers are not impregnable, however, as logic and history make clear.
It is worth remembering that great powers were heavily engaged with one another before the Napoleonic Wars, the Crimean War, the Franco-Prussian War, World War I, and World War II. In some cases, they were also important trading partners. Yet major war happened anyway. And despite what Thornton may wish, victory is still possible in modern war; not every conflict leads to “certain catastrophic losses for all,” as she says a U.S.-Chinese war would. War is always a real possibility when great powers struggle over regional hegemony. Helping China rise rapidly made a clash of this sort more likely—even if it is not inevitable.
The United States mistakenly helped create a peer competitor that it may not be able to contain.
Like Thornton, Sun Zhe misrepresents my argument when he claims that I view China as “robotically destined for war,” making a U.S.-Chinese war “all but inevitable.” In fact, I maintained that security competition is inescapable but war is not—as Sun should recognize, since he quotes me saying, “This rivalry can be managed in the hope of avoiding a war.”
Sun seems to think that even an intense security competition can be avoided, but he is wrong. In his view, China is “a conservative, status quo power,” and the United States is moving toward a China policy that emphasizes cooperation over conflict. Neither characterization is accurate. China is explicitly committed to radically altering the political status quo regarding the East China and South China Seas, Taiwan, and its border with India. Meanwhile, the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden shows no sign of returning to the failed policy of engagement. It is willing to talk with Beijing and manage bilateral relations, but the available evidence—such as the continuation of U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade war and repeated signals of a growing commitment to defend Taiwan—suggests that Biden and his team intend to maintain a hard-nosed containment strategy.
Sun also emphasizes that although numerous Chinese are pessimistic about the future of U.S.-Chinese relations, there are also many who hold an optimistic view and want to improve ties. The same is true in the United States. At the end of the day, however, those debates are eclipsed by the competitive pressures inherent in an anarchic system, where each state must ultimately take care of itself. Those pressures will encourage China to strive for hegemony in Asia and lead the United States to try to prevent it—even if there are dissenters in both countries.
Sun writes that “engagement modernized China to an extraordinary degree.” He is correct, of course, and that is wonderful news for China. But it is not good news for the United States, which mistakenly helped create a peer competitor that it ultimately may not be able to contain.
13. ‘I really don’t want to be the last African-American secretary of defense’
‘I really don’t want to be the last African-American secretary of defense’
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin never pictured any of this, he said Thursday during a White House panel celebrating Black History Month, alongside five other Black members of President Joe Biden’s cabinet.
He thought he’d graduate West Point, complete his service obligation and then go to law school, he said. But after 41 years in uniform and another year leading the Defense Department as a civilian, he said his new goal is to leave the department a more diverse and inclusive place than he found it.
“I’m honored to be the first African-American secretary of defense, the 28th secretary of defense ― but I really don’t want to be the last African-American secretary of defense,” he said.
The diversity, equity and inclusion conversation has been going on in the American military practically since its inception. All-Black, male units eventually gave way to integrated units, and then the integration of women.
That could be due to an implicit bias in promotion decisions, or because of an environment that is not necessarily welcoming to service members of color, who might choose to leave earlier than they might have if they felt more appreciated.
“I equate diversity with being invited to the dance,” Austin said. “Inclusion is when you’re asked to dance.”
“I felt that if he could do that in that day and age, surely I could be successful as well,” Austin said of Flipper, who commissioned in 1877.
Flipper was later drummed out of the Army under racially-charged circumstances. President Bill Clinton pardoned him in 1999.
This discussion ignited in the summer of 2020, after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. The Air Force’s senior enlisted airman at the time, himself Black, penned an open letter on his experiences as a Black man in uniform.
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"Believe me, my heart starts racing like most other Black men in America when I see those blue [police] lights behind me," Wright said.
His public statements were followed by all of the services, who set up their own diversity and inclusion projects.
Soon after, then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper convened a DoD board to look at diversity and inclusion, with some quick changes that included removing photos from promotion packets and reviewing hair standards that might unfairly burden people of color.
Less than a year later, Austin came on board, with a mandate to pick up that ball and run with it.
“One of my goals is to make sure that we have that environment that’s not only diverse in the ranks, but diverse in leadership, and inclusive as well,” he said.
Meghann Myers is the Pentagon bureau chief at Military Times. She covers operations, policy, personnel, leadership and other issues affecting service members. Follow on Twitter @Meghann_MT
14. Top civilian leader shares 6 objectives for the Army in 2022 and beyond
Excerpts:
1. Her first objective is establishing “a sustainable strategic path” for the service amid “an unpredictable future,”
2. Wormuth’s second goal is to make the Army “more data-centric and [able to] conduct operations in contested environments,” she said.
3. Her third focuses on hardening the force and its installations against the risks posed by climate change.
4. ... improving command climates across the force
5. ... reducing “harmful behaviors” like suicide, sexual assault and sexual harassment.
6. Finally, Wormuth called for the Army “to strategically adapt the way we recruit and retain talent” as her sixth objective.
Top civilian leader shares 6 objectives for the Army in 2022 and beyond
The Army’s top civilian leader unveiled her top six objectives for the service in a Tuesday letter to the force and in remarks at a Center for a New American Security event. They include improving command climates, recruiting, modernization efforts and more.
Army Secretary Christine Wormuth hopes laying out the objectives — which expand upon her and Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville’s priorities of people, readiness and modernization — will help the service “achieve specific and tangible outcomes that we can continue to advance in the years ahead.”
Her first objective is establishing “a sustainable strategic path” for the service amid “an unpredictable future,” according to the letter. Wormuth cautioned that the Army is making “difficult choices” due to “increased fiscal pressures,” and emphasized that the service needs to keep pressing its modernization efforts to compete with Russia and China.
McConville implied Thursday in remarks at a Heritage Foundation event that the Army may continue to cut end strength as part of that effort.
“[Do you] want a big stick, or do you want a sharp stick? I believe in a sharp stick,” he said.
Wormuth’s second goal is to make the Army “more data-centric and [able to] conduct operations in contested environments,” she said. Her third focuses on hardening the force and its installations against the risks posed by climate change. The Army released its new climate strategy alongside Wormuth’s letter.
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The U.S. Army’s climate strategy pushes the service to adapt so it can both operate in and protect itself against increasingly harsh environments, while also becoming more energy efficient.
Objectives four and five among her priorities are improving command climates across the force and reducing “harmful behaviors” like suicide, sexual assault and sexual harassment.
When explaining those priorities at CNAS, Wormuth described the murder of Spc. Vanessa Guillén as a “searing event...[that] brought our very much-needed attention on the challenge of sexual harassment and sexual assault.”
Guillén’s death and the subsequent investigations have driven a series of still-unfolding changes across the force, including action from Congress to reform the military justice system.
The secretary also recognized that command climates and “harmful behaviors” can’t be eliminated overnight, emphasizing in her letter that the Army must continue to “institutionalize” prevention programs and select “the best possible” leaders to improve “year after year.”
Finally, Wormuth called for the Army “to strategically adapt the way we recruit and retain talent” as her sixth objective.
“We need to tell the Army’s story in new ways to ensure we remain the first choice for Americans who want to serve their country,” she said in the letter. “My goal is to help all Americans to be able to see themselves in what the Army has to offer.”
McConville explained Thursday that part of the challenge the service faces in recruiting is a reduction in the proportion of Americans qualified to serve. He told listeners that the Army “need[s] all the help we can get to inspire young men and women” to enlist.
Wormuth also reflected on how younger Americans may not have the same reasons for serving as they did 20 years ago in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, which necessitates a different approach to recruiting.
“Are we really reaching out to every possible American that might want to serve in the Army? And are we communicating what the Army offers to young Americans in the most effective way?” she asked. “We have to...better articulate what is the value proposition for joining the Army.”
Davis Winkie is a staff reporter covering the Army. He originally joined Military Times as a reporting intern in 2020. Before journalism, Davis worked as a military historian. He is also a human resources officer in the Army National Guard.
15. Why American Lost the War in Afghanistan by Robert Bruce Adolph
At the links below are two articles on Afghanistan that are published in the Special Forces Association's current issue of "The Drop."
America has forgotten the lesson of total war
The American Civil War was a watershed event with global implications. Beforehand, Western armed conflicts were fought by armies largely on the European-Napoleonic model, which envisioned a victor emerging after winning battlefield engagements of massed armies. The objective was the destruction of the uniformed armed forces’ ability to fight.
Harm to the civilian populace in proximity to battlefields was considered unfortunate collateral damage. But civilians — those not in uniform — were seldom targeted. That all changed in the Civil War. Is there a forgotten lesson from this conflict?
As the Civil War began, the European-Napoleonic model for war was generally still accepted. In the early years of the war, army met army with the expectation that the political and moral questions raised would be decided in battlefield victories by men wearing uniforms.
Both sides were led by officers trained at West Point. But the war took a significant turn with President Abraham Lincoln’s appointment of Ulysses S. Grant to general-in-chief of all Union forces.
The series of battlefield defeats suffered by Union armies at the outset of the conflict convinced both North and South alike that southern military leaders were superior. Although there is a grain of truth here, Gen. Robert E. Lee had major advantages.
He fought largely on his home turf of Virginia - familiar - terrain and often on the defensive.
Why American Lost the War in Afghanistan
INTRODUCTION
America lost the war in Afghanistan. All the blood and treasure expended was - in the end - largely for naught. I understand why many who fought there might feel differently. It is terribly difficult to walk away from the massive sunk costs. The assertion that US efforts were in vain is a hateful idea to those who lost comrades-in-arms or were horribly scarred physically or psychologically.
Tragically, the same was true of those in the US Armed Forces who battled bravely in Vietnam. The national warfighting objectives adopted in Southwest Asia by the Bush Administration clearly failed, leaving his successors with the ultimate recurring foreign policy disaster.
Everyone involved is the worse for it, especially the Afghans who supported the US and her allies for more than 20 years.
Our nation possesses one of the largest and best-funded militaries in the world. US troops are well trained and disciplined. US general officers are well educated and dedicated to task under constitutionally mandated civilian authority. Moreover, NATO stood shoulder-to-shoulder with their ally. So, how could America lose?
Warfighting strategies are gauged through an analysis of three factors. These are suitability, feasibility, and acceptability. Hint: America’s political and military leadership failed to appreciate all three. The US institutions of the Presidency, Congress and, Pentagon should step up and shoulder the blame. I am concerned that they won’t.
16. Was your T-shirt made using forced labor? A new U.S. law takes aim at ‘made in Xinjiang’
Excerpts:
Critics of the law in the U.S. business community said that it could have negative consequences for the very people it is trying to help — the Uyghurs — by weakening Xinjiang’s economy, thereby impacting their livelihoods. In response, McGovern notes that the Uyghur community itself has been the most vocal proponent of the legislation: “The idea that we’re going to continue to turn a blind eye to forced labor and human rights atrocities, we’re going to turn a blind eye to a genocide because at the end of the day, the status quo was somehow good for the people who were the victims — I don’t buy that argument.”
Murphy, the human rights professor, believes the law could lead to change on the ground. “I think that people tend to think that this is an intractable issue, that there’s nothing that can convince the Chinese government to change their position toward the Uyghurs, but in the last five years, we have seen the Chinese government change their tactics,” she said. “Some companies have seen massive reductions in their profits. Some companies … in mainland China have stopped using the labor transfer program.”
For Asat, the Uyghur human rights lawyer, the new law is personal. Her brother has been held since 2016 in the same system of detention camps that has conscripted Uyghurs into forced labor. She believes that by cutting off U.S. business in the region, the law could pressure the Chinese government to end that system.
“What we’re seeing is that the willing perpetrators are emboldened by impunity and the lack of accountability in their pursuit of profit,” she said. “And now, I think this bill in particular shifts the burden on them.”
Was your T-shirt made using forced labor? A new U.S. law takes aim at ‘made in Xinjiang’
It’s the most significant effort yet to address forced labor in China; it’s also a challenge for U.S. companies and their supply chains.
What do cotton T-shirts, cancer medications and solar panels have in common? All are products caught in a growing effort by U.S. lawmakers to crack down on forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A new law is taking aim at products with any raw materials that can be traced to Xinjiang. That amounts to billions of dollars in goods that have wound up in American homes.
For many human rights advocates, China’s repression of its Uyghur population in Xinjiang has risen to the top of a long list of concerns. Researchers have documented forced labor not only in Xinjiang’s detention camps, where more than a million Uyghurs are estimated to have been imprisoned, but also outside the camps, where Uyghurs and other minorities have been transferred to factory jobs by the government. The human rights violations in Xinjiang, which independent organizations have labeled crimes against humanity and genocidal, were instrumental in leading to the U.S. diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Olympic Games. Now, American policymakers are gearing up to deliver a fresh rebuke of the Chinese government for its policies in Xinjiang, and corporations for their alleged complicity.
Hear more from Lili Pike about this story:
Passed in December by a rare bipartisan vote in Congress, the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act sets an effective import ban on all goods made fully or partly in Xinjiang. Under the law, it is assumed that all Xinjiang production involves forced labor. The onus will be on the importer to prove otherwise.
“It is good to have this kind of sweeping presumption that products made in that region are made with forced labor,” said Laura Murphy, a professor of human rights and contemporary slavery at Sheffield Hallam University. “Given the research I’ve done, and so many other scholars have done now, and journalists, it’s clear that the program of forced labor is so pervasive in Xinjiang as to affect practically every company and every industry in the region.”
Because the law’s presumption is so sweeping, its effect on U.S. businesses could be as well. Grid reviewed Chinese customs data and found that Xinjiang exported nearly $20 billion in goods to countries around the world in 2021, shedding light on the region’s links to key global supply chains.
Xinjiang supplies a large share of the world’s cotton, tomatoes, and silicon used in solar panels. U.S. lawmakers imposed restrictions on these goods last year, but the new law will step up enforcement and expand the net to include all goods that originate in Xinjiang.
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The new law goes into effect in June, and many American companies are already scrambling to trace their supply chains — and in many cases adjusting or rethinking completely how their products come to market. Given the difficulty of proving that Xinjiang-based companies aren’t engaged in forced labor, experts told Grid that most companies will have to find a way to source from outside of Xinjiang.
Beyond the practical and logistical difficulties, U.S. business advocates said that American companies feel caught between superpowers. “They’re between a rock and a hard place, because China is ratcheting up pressure on them to not say anything or to speak up on China’s behalf,” said Doug Barry, senior director of communications at the U.S.-China Business Council. “And then the U.S. government is suggesting that they leave or consider leaving, or that they’re somehow unpatriotic because they’re not taking a public stand.”
For Rayhan Asat, a Uyghur human rights lawyer and a Yale Law School Fellow, the reckoning over corporate entanglement in Xinjiang is long overdue.
“This momentum took years to build up,” said Asat, whose brother, Ekpar, is currently being held in a detention camp in Xinjiang. “I think we have reached a pivotal moment in history concerning global trade supply chain and human rights due diligence, especially concerning powerful countries like China.”
Supply chain: From Xinjiang to the U.S.
For a region more than a thousand miles from China’s coastal ports, Xinjiang is surprisingly well-connected to global commerce.
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Direct trade between Xinjiang and the U.S. amounted to $1 billion over the past five years — made up largely of electric-generating sets, lamps and lights, and toys. Last year, the No. 2 export was heterocyclic compounds, an ingredient used in antiviral, cancer and many other drugs.
In the context of global trade, these direct exports are relatively low in volume; the far greater impact of the new law — on supply chains and American store shelves alike — will be felt in U.S. companies’ indirect connections to Xinjiang.
Xinjiang products and raw materials often reach the U.S. via other paths: through other parts of China and third-party countries. These are the next links in the supply chains that originate in Xinjiang, and sites for the next stages of refining or manufacturing.
It’s hard to track the flow within China, but Chinese customs data shows billions of dollars of goods are shipped annually from Xinjiang to outside manufacturing hubs. The top global exports from Xinjiang in the last two years were common consumer goods and raw materials including apparel, plastics, electrical equipment and footwear, and the top destinations for these goods were Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Russia. But the flow of goods doesn’t necessarily end there; the next leg of the journey can bring the products to the United States and other major markets.
A prime example of Xinjiang’s long and winding connection to global markets is cotton. Xinjiang is a dominant producer, supplying 85 percent of China’s cotton and 20 percent of the world total. Customs data reviewed by Grid showed that Xinjiang directly exported only $12 million in 2021, while China exported $13 billion, which suggests that Xinjiang cotton is traded internally in China before being shipped out.
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A report published in November by researchers from Sheffield Hallam University shows how cotton from Xinjiang moves through this supply chain to global retailers. They found that 103 major fashion brands may be linked through third-party country factories to Chinese fabric companies with suppliers in Xinjiang, most of which had used forced labor. Companies that may be connected to Xinjiang in this way include global brands such as Uniqlo and Tommy Hilfiger.
The researchers also showed how specific articles of clothing from international brands have a particularly high likelihood of containing cotton from Xinjiang. Take as an example a shipment of pants sent to Banana Republic in San Francisco in January 2021. The pants were sewn in a Sri Lankan factory, from fabric that researchers traced to Jiangsu Lianfa, a major Chinese fabric supplier. Company records showed that a major source of Jiangsu Lianfa’s yarn is a subsidiary in Xinjiang. The researchers reviewed practices at the subsidiary and reported that it used forced labor.
The report did not accuse the international brands of intentionally using forced labor or obscuring their supply chains, but the researchers wrote that the effect was essentially the “laundering” of Xinjiang cotton.
A farmer picks cotton in Hami in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region on Oct. 9, 2020. (HUYANG/Barcroft Media via Getty Images)
The same phenomenon is common in the solar industry supply chain, which follows a similar route — from Xinjiang to Southeast Asia to major solar energy consumers like the United States. Xinjiang is the source for 45 percent of the world’s solar-grade polysilicon, the key ingredient in solar panels. Another Sheffield Hallam report, published in May 2021, showed how a handful of Chinese polysilicon titans have used forced labor in their supply chains — and that these supply chains are linked to many of the top U.S. solar-panel installers.
These industries have been under scrutiny since the U.S. introduced import bans targeting them over the past year. But under the new law, all U.S. importers will be responsible for understanding the details in these distant branches of their supply chains. “I think we’re going to see a lot of other industries taken by surprise when it’s discovered that their supply chain can be traced back to Xinjiang,” said Murphy. “I think every company in every sector needs to be looking into this.”
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The Xinjiang exit
To understand the potential impact of the new law, Grid looked at the fallout from the earlier, less sweeping round of U.S. restrictions on Xinjiang goods.
Navigating the rules has been a challenge for many companies. Richard Mojica, a lawyer at Miller & Chevalier who has worked on Xinjiang-related cases, said that most companies aren’t accustomed to collecting the kind of detailed information required to prove they aren’t sourcing from Xinjiang or from certain restricted organizations there. It can also be difficult for U.S. firms to get mid-chain suppliers to release information on those at the source; the middlemen are often concerned about being cut out of the transaction.
“In the immediate term, it has caused a lot of disruption in the industries because a bunch of stuff is getting detained at the border,” said Mojica. “And the chances of successfully appealing are moderate.”
Technically, companies can continue to import Xinjiang-made products if they prove that no forced labor was involved. But several experts told Grid that doing so is nearly impossible.
“It’s not clear that it’s possible for a third-party auditor to be able to go in [to Xinjiang] and say with any certainty that there’s no forced labor involved,” said Anna Ashton, a senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute.
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Given these challenges, U.S. companies have thus far tended to seek alternatives to Xinjiang rather than attempt to defend their suppliers’ business records. In one example, Chinese solar companies are now largely sourcing polysilicon from outside of Xinjiang for their U.S. customers, Bloomberg New Energy Finance analyst Pol Lezcano told Grid. And many apparel companies told the Sheffield Hallam University researchers they were no longer operating or sourcing from Xinjiang.
For companies with large markets in China itself, complying with the new law isn’t just a logistical, supply chain problem; it’s also a major business risk. Some U.S. companies have decided that they would no longer source materials from Xinjiang, only to meet the ire of the Chinese government and consumers. Last year, Nike and H&M faced online backlash and boycotts in China after announcing they wouldn’t use materials from Xinjiang. Chinese sportswear brands’ sales surged in the aftermath as nationalist social media figures encouraged customers to buy local.
For Barry, of the U.S.-China Business Council, this represents a worrying trend that may get worse for all U.S. firms operating in China. “It’s more and more difficult for U.S. companies of all stripes to do business there.” he said. “That will lead to much less investment, much less business between the two largest economies in the world.”
But according to Democratic Massachusetts Rep. Jim McGovern, co-author of the new U.S. law, corporations have been far too complacent in China for far too long. “A lot of U.S. companies, a lot of international companies have taken this attitude of ‘see no evil, hear no evil,’ you know, ‘No one is showing us the forced labor, so we’re off the hook,’” he said. “Well, the bottom line is, that’s not good enough. They know what’s going on, but they choose to continue to do business in that region because it helps their profits. And, quite frankly, they’re complicit in this terrible human rights atrocity.”
Uyghur Solidarity Campaign UK placards are pictured at a protest opposite the Chinese embassy in London on Aug. 5, 2021. (Mark Kerrison/In Pictures via Getty Images)
Forced labor in Xinjiang: Can a law make a difference?
There is no doubt that the new law will change the way U.S. companies operate their supply chains in China; in some ways, it is already having that effect. Less clear is whether these changes will make a mark on Chinese policies in Xinjiang.
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For one thing, questions remain about how the law will be implemented and enforced. It’s unlikely that companies across all sectors will be held to account immediately, Mojica told Grid. Given the wide scope of the law, he said, implementation is “going to be gradual and calculated.”
Perhaps more important, those goods and raw materials from Xinjiang are likely to find other customers. That’s always a possibility when one country — even one as powerful as the U.S. — imposes sanctions. And in at least one sector, it’s already happening.
Polysilicon — that key ingredient in solar panels — is in high global demand, as countries seek to wean their economies off coal and other old sources of energy. “U.S. sanctions will have no economic repercussion on Xinjiang-based polysilicon manufacturers,” said Bloomberg’s Lezcano, “because there’s plenty of polysilicon demand that comes from outside the U.S.”
Overall, Xinjiang’s top trading partners are in Central Asia — countries that aren’t known for their sensitivity to human rights. And even as exports to the U.S. fell last year, overall exports from Xinjiang rose to a five-year high of nearly $20 billion.
For the new sanctions to have a stronger effect, the U.S. will need allies, said the Asia Society’s Ashton: “Whatever we do, as the United States it will be much more effective if we’re ultimately doing it in concert with, or at least parallel to, similar actions from our allies and partners.” The EU is currently considering passing similar legislation.
Critics of the law in the U.S. business community said that it could have negative consequences for the very people it is trying to help — the Uyghurs — by weakening Xinjiang’s economy, thereby impacting their livelihoods. In response, McGovern notes that the Uyghur community itself has been the most vocal proponent of the legislation: “The idea that we’re going to continue to turn a blind eye to forced labor and human rights atrocities, we’re going to turn a blind eye to a genocide because at the end of the day, the status quo was somehow good for the people who were the victims — I don’t buy that argument.”
Murphy, the human rights professor, believes the law could lead to change on the ground. “I think that people tend to think that this is an intractable issue, that there’s nothing that can convince the Chinese government to change their position toward the Uyghurs, but in the last five years, we have seen the Chinese government change their tactics,” she said. “Some companies have seen massive reductions in their profits. Some companies … in mainland China have stopped using the labor transfer program.”
For Asat, the Uyghur human rights lawyer, the new law is personal. Her brother has been held since 2016 in the same system of detention camps that has conscripted Uyghurs into forced labor. She believes that by cutting off U.S. business in the region, the law could pressure the Chinese government to end that system.
“What we’re seeing is that the willing perpetrators are emboldened by impunity and the lack of accountability in their pursuit of profit,” she said. “And now, I think this bill in particular shifts the burden on them.”
17. Air Force commando course to be overseen by someone who hasn’t gone through it
Sigh....
If we are going to look at numbers, USSOCOM has never been commanded by a career Special Forces officer despite Special Forces being the largests element within theUS Special Operations Command.
Another issue is command slating. Is the slate determined by the service (as in the US Army) or by USSOCOM? USSOCOM does not have complete control over personnel management of special operations personnel and has no cotnrol over the promositons of special oeprations personnel.
Excerpts:
Though he doesn’t wear the scarlet beret of a special tactics officer or the maroon beret of a combat rescue officer, Dula’s replacement, Col. Colunga, is no stranger to special operations, according to his command biography. Colunga commanded special operations forces in garrison and in combat and has deployed to Africa and the Middle East. He is currently the vice commander for the 352nd Special Operations Wing, which flies MC-130 and CV-22 transport aircraft out of Royal Air Force Mildenhall, United Kingdom. Before that, he commanded the air component for joint special operations at Central Command, which oversees military operations in the Middle East and Southwest Asia.
Across the Air Force, aviators, and pilots in particular, often rise to command faster than non-aviators. For example, many of the past commanders of Air Force Special Operations Command flew or navigated aboard MC-130s, AC-130 gunships, HH-3E helicopters, or even the massive C-141 transport jets. Lt. Gen. Slife, the command’s current top officer, flew MH-53 Pave Low helicopters for much of his career, as did his predecessor, Lt. Gen. Marshall Webb, who now heads Air Education and Training Command.
Some of that may be a numbers game. After all, AFSOC has more than 19,500 personnel worldwide, only about 500 of whom are pararescuemen and only about 500 are combat controllers, according to SOFREP. Though the Special Warfare Training Wing falls under Air Education and Training Command, an aviator taking command is a common feature across the service. Only now, one will also be in charge of a school for the Air Force’s elite ground-pounders.
Air Force commando course to be overseen by someone who hasn’t gone through it
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The Air Force has appointed an aviator to oversee the initial training course which all airmen must pass through in order to join the service’s elite ranks of special operators. Col. Nathan Colunga, a master navigator with vast experience in the MC-130 family of special operations transport planes, will take the helm of the Special Warfare Training Wing from Col. Mason Dula later this year, an Air Force official confirmed to Task & Purpose.
The appointment comes in the middle of a whirlwind of controversy over whether Air Force Special Operations Command gave preferential treatment to a female special warfare candidate in the training pipeline. Airmen past and present, including the female candidate, criticized the command for allegedly lowering the standards. Lt. Gen. James Slife, the head of the command, denied those accusations before asking the Secretary of the Air Force, Frank Kendall, to direct the branch’s Inspector General to review the situation.
“We can unequivocally say the standards — which are tied to mission accomplishment — have not changed,” Slife said on Facebook last month in response to the firestorm.
Despite the controversy, Marilyn Holliday, the chief of operations for public affairs at Air Education Training Command, explained that Colunga’s incoming command “is in line with the standard timeline for wing command.” Dula will hit his two-year anniversary in command this August. Holliday said that the commander of the Special Warfare Training Wing is selected from the Special Operations/Rescue wing command selection board list. That list includes special warfare officers, such as the combat rescue officers and special tactics officers who lead Air Force special operators into battle. But it also includes air commando officers, who are the pilots and navigators who fly the aircraft that take them in and out of fire, Holliday said.
U.S. Air Force Col. Nathan Colunga, 352nd Special Operations Wing vice commander, briefs Countess Clare Euston, Lord Lieutenant of Suffolk, and Phil Jones, Deputy Lieutenant, during a familiarization tour at Royal Air Force Lakenheath, England, Sept. 16, 2021. (U.S. Air Force photo by Airman 1st Class Cedrique Oldaker)
“Second Air Force Commander Maj. Gen. Michele Edmondson selected a leadership team with the desired skillset, diversity of experience, and perspective to ensure that Special Warfare training programs meet the needs for future operations,” Holliday said.
The leadership team also includes Col. Edward Irick, a combat rescue officer who will become the wing’s vice commander.
Though Air Force special warfare has existed in one form or another since World War II, the Special Warfare Training Wing is only four years old. It was activated in 2018 to combine the essential introductory training for the various special warfare fields into one course rather than each schoolhouse running their own slightly different version of it, Military Times reported at the time.
The wing’s first commander was Col. James “Parks” Hughes, who wore the scarlet beret of a special tactics officer to the unit’s activation ceremony in October 2018. Special tactics officers lead Air Force combat controllers, commandos who bring in air support and coordinate air traffic for other special operations troops such as Navy SEALs, Army Special Forces or British SAS. Hughes was succeeded by a fellow special tactics officer, Col. Mason Dula, in August 2020.
The training pipeline for Air Force special operators is notoriously difficult. Historically, the two-year combat controller pipeline washes out 70 to 80% of its candidates. Air Force combat controllers and pararescue jumpers are trained to the same technical and physical standards as other special operators such as Army Green Berets and Navy SEALs. But combat controllers and PJs also receive extensive training in the form of air traffic control and combat medicine, respectively, so they can control crowded airspace, call in airstrikes, and evacuate wounded troops from deep behind enemy lines.
Airmen undergoing training with the Special Warfare Training Wing carry weights as teams through Medina Annex at Joint Base San Antonio, Texas Apr. 19, 2018. (Air Force photo / Alexander Goad)
Though he doesn’t wear the scarlet beret of a special tactics officer or the maroon beret of a combat rescue officer, Dula’s replacement, Col. Colunga, is no stranger to special operations, according to his command biography. Colunga commanded special operations forces in garrison and in combat and has deployed to Africa and the Middle East. He is currently the vice commander for the 352nd Special Operations Wing, which flies MC-130 and CV-22 transport aircraft out of Royal Air Force Mildenhall, United Kingdom. Before that, he commanded the air component for joint special operations at Central Command, which oversees military operations in the Middle East and Southwest Asia.
Across the Air Force, aviators, and pilots in particular, often rise to command faster than non-aviators. For example, many of the past commanders of Air Force Special Operations Command flew or navigated aboard MC-130s, AC-130 gunships, HH-3E helicopters, or even the massive C-141 transport jets. Lt. Gen. Slife, the command’s current top officer, flew MH-53 Pave Low helicopters for much of his career, as did his predecessor, Lt. Gen. Marshall Webb, who now heads Air Education and Training Command.
Some of that may be a numbers game. After all, AFSOC has more than 19,500 personnel worldwide, only about 500 of whom are pararescuemen and only about 500 are combat controllers, according to SOFREP. Though the Special Warfare Training Wing falls under Air Education and Training Command, an aviator taking command is a common feature across the service. Only now, one will also be in charge of a school for the Air Force’s elite ground-pounders.
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18. Elemental Strategy - Countering the Chinese Communist Party’s Efforts to Dominate the Rare Earth Industry
Conclusion:
The United States possesses the tools and resource endowment to compete with China in the rare earth domain. To do so, America must unleash the power of its private sector. But Washington must also advance a positive technological, environmental, and human rights vision for the rare earth sector. Time is of the essence.
February 10, 2022 | Memo
Elemental Strategy
Countering the Chinese Communist Party’s Efforts to Dominate the Rare Earth Industry
Emily de La Bruyère
Senior Fellow
Nathan Picarsic
Senior Fellow
fdd.org · by Emily de La Bruyère Senior Fellow · February 10, 2022
On February 24, 2021, President Joe Biden issued an executive order launching a 100-day review of supply chain risks across the U.S. economy. The review concluded that established policy related to domestic production is at the core of America’s supply chain weaknesses, including in critical mineral supply chains. Congress’ 2021 Consolidated Appropriations Act also tasked the director of national intelligence with studying critical mineral investments undertaken as part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. The bipartisan 2021 infrastructure bill included a range of critical mineral supply chain appropriations as well as a clear statement that “critical minerals are fundamental to the economy, competitiveness, and security of the United States.”
Assessments of supply chain security often call for measures that extend from “mines to magnets” — that is, from the point of extraction to the finished product. Yet Beijing’s industrial policy seeks to ensure dependence on China that begins before extraction and extends beyond production. Beijing also seeks to control the pools of capital at every stage.
China dominates the supply of “heavy” rare earths through both domestic investment and access to extraction activities abroad (for example, in Myanmar). China also dominates the technologies, equipment, and capacity needed to separate and process rare earths and to produce rare earth permanent magnets. This stranglehold cements CCP control over the rare earths that are most critical and have the highest value-added. On top of that, by controlling key pools of capital, Beijing ensures that the rare earth industry continues to depend on financial or operational endeavors controlled by China. This is the case across rare earth production, separation, and downstream component manufacturing.
In other words, China’s dominance — in both heavy and light rare earths and in other critical minerals — is not simply a function of resource control. Beijing maintains industrial leadership, and even control, in the manufacture of specialized equipment, in later-stage production, and in the financing necessary for capital-intensive processes across the value chain.
Chinese sources — ranging from official government statements to industry and press commentary — frame dominance across the rare earth industrial chain as a strategic lever in today’s great power contest. That effort is part of a broader Chinese strategy that converts economic and technological integration into global power projection. Without rare earth elements, the Chinese press has observed, the “U.S. military’s technological advantage will be zero.”
The United States already faces dangerous disadvantages, since rare earth elements and the permanent magnets that incorporate them are vital across national security and commercial use cases. Today, dependencies on China for rare earth elements affect the production of everything from F-35 fighter jets to medical equipment. Given their importance for electric vehicles and wind turbines, rare earth elements are also integral to current efforts to transition to cleaner forms of energy and transportation. Industry observers project that the market for rare earth magnets will double within the current decade.
Chinese sources consider the current era of strategic competition to be one that is no longer a competition among individual companies, but rather a competition between supply chains. Dominance over global rare earth supply and processing provides Chinese players — commercial and military alike — with leverage that no rival can replicate.
The first step in remedying this situation is to recognize and understand Beijing’s strategy. Only then can U.S. policymakers develop and implement a systematic response to ensure the United States has secure and trusted access to the rare earth elements, processed oxides, metal alloys, and permanent magnets necessary for U.S. national and economic security.
A responsive U.S. strategy must develop supply lines, production capabilities, and end-product value chains wholly independent from Chinese influence, supply chain leverage, and capital. This effort must prioritize the role of the U.S. private sector and its advantages vis-à-vis Beijing. The United States, its allies, and private-sector partners must also recognize that Chinese control is not always direct or obvious: Enduring solutions require taking a fine-tooth comb to the entire ecosystem — and to the entire network of players involved.
A winning U.S. strategy can be distilled down to four mutually reinforcing lines of effort. First, DoD should lead an aggressive stockpiling program to guarantee access to sub-systems, permanent magnets, and raw materials necessary for U.S. military programs. Second, tax incentives should be the central driver of the U.S. government’s efforts to activate the power of the American private sector and to make full use of America’s enviable domestic endowment of light and heavy rare earths as well as related production capacity. Third, the United States should work with allies and partners to develop trusted supply chains and to position themselves more competitively. Finally, the U.S. strategy should leverage both economic and military tools to impose costs and introduce inefficiencies in China’s rare earth sector and corresponding industrial policy.
How We Got Here: China’s Historical Emphasis on Rare Earths
The People’s Republic of China has focused on rare earth extraction, processing, and downstream applications for as long as it has existed. “Scientists and national leaders foresaw the importance of rare earths at the beginning of the founding of the People’s Republic of China,” wrote Huo Zhijie, a scholar and industry researcher affiliated with Inner Mongolia Normal University, in 2019. In 1953, under the guidance of national science and technology policy, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the PRC Ministry of Metallurgical Industry jointly launched construction of China’s first rare earth plant, the China Baotou Number One Steel Rare Earth Factory. That plant was completed in 1959. Ten years later, Beijing assigned the plant to state-owned champion Baosteel. “This marks the start of China’s rare earth industry,” explained Huo. In 1963, the People’s Republic of China established the Baotou Metallurgical Research Institute to both research and produce rare earths.
In the years after Deng’s famous quip that “the Middle East has oil and China has rare earths,” the country continued to export its rare earth products at low cost to “meet the needs of U.S. industry and national defense,” as one Chinese industrial planner noted it in 2018. This rendered the United States dependent on Chinese sources of these products. During this time, China also targeted downstream U.S. companies in the rare earth industrial chain. In 1995, a consortium of Chinese state-owned companies purchased a majority stake in Magnequench, a General Motors subsidiary that pioneered, and held a dominant role in, the manufacture of rare earth magnets. In September 2001, Magnequench’s U.S. production lines shut down as the company’s stewards gradually shifted production to China. Two years later, the company transferred its research and management functions to Asia.
The early 2000s marked a turning point in China’s rare earth strategy. The new millennium heralded the development of novel rare earth mining and processing technologies as well as the discovery of new rare earth sources. Global prices dropped. Beijing’s market share shrank. Concerned by these trends and by corresponding decreases in its influence over international markets, Beijing worked to buttress its strategic position at home and abroad. In 2006, Beijing imposed export quotas and domestic market controls over the industry. In 2007, China’s Ministry of Land and Resources heightened regulation of rare earth output. The following year, Beijing began integrating and consolidating its rare earth industry. In 2009, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) launched the “Special Plan for the Development of the Rare Earth Industry and the Policy for the Development of the Rare Earth Industry.” MIIT also joined with the Ministry of Commerce in strengthening China’s export management system for rare earths. “The quota allocation method,” explains Cai Enze, a former Chinese political leader and industrial planner, “controls China’s rare earth exports and prevents the loss of resources.”
The next year, in 2010, the world witnessed the coercive power that China had accumulated through its position in the rare earth industry. Beijing had solidified its industrial chain and could deploy targeted export restrictions to influence pricing and, in turn, corporate policies globally. China’s political leadership was prepared to take advantage of this position for geopolitical purposes. During a diplomatic standoff with Tokyo over control of the Senkaku Islands, Beijing temporarily halted rare earth exports to Japan. Tokyo’s then-minister of fiscal and economic policy ceded at the time that “the de-facto ban on rare-earths export that China has imposed could have a very big impact on Japan’s economy.” This prompted the United States, Japan, and the European Union to launch a joint World Trade Organization (WTO) case against China in 2012. While the WTO ruled against China in 2014 and obligated the Chinese government to roll back its rare earth export quotas, CCP industrial policy replaced quotas with consolidated state control of the rare earth industry. In effect, the CCP adjusted its policy to function by virtue of influence over production through tightly policed annual production ceilings.
Around the same time, Beijing launched a series of high-profile national-level industrial plans, including the 2011 “Strategic Emerging Industries Initiative” and, four years later, “Made in China 2025.” Wang Denghong of the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences noted in 2019 that rare earths “play a key role” across emerging strategic industries. These industries include new-generation information technology, high-end equipment manufacturing, “new materials,” biology, new energy, new energy vehicles, energy conservation, and environmental protection.
Following the 2014 WTO ruling against China, the People’s Republic of China consolidated the rare earth industry according to the “Guiding Opinions of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council on Deepening the Reform of State-owned Enterprises (2015).” These policies increased state control of strategic resources. Beijing consolidated six major rare earth enterprises, all state-owned: Chinalco, North Rare Earth, Xiamen Tungsten, China Minmetals, Guangdong Rare Earth, and South Rare Earth Group. Beijing also directed its champions to capture both upstream resources and downstream applications. The Ministry of Commerce’s 2019 “Catalogue of Export License Management Goods” announced that special licenses are required to export any rare earths from China.
These industrial plans follow the tradition of the CCP’s “Two Markets, Two Resources” strategy. First cited in official Chinese policy in 1981, this strategy frames Beijing’s entire ecosystem of economic and security plans; foreign markets become dependent on China, while China remains relatively autonomous.
Alongside those plans, Beijing also developed policies focused directly on rare earths. On May 10, 2011, the State Council, the chief administrative authority of China’s central government, issued “Several Opinions on Promoting the Sustainable and Healthy Development of the Rare Earth Industry.” The opinions laid out a plan to establish a standardized program and monitoring system for China’s rare earth industry. They also required, for the first time, the establishment of a rare earth strategic reserve system. The State Council explained that this system would include “a combination of national reserves and enterprise (commercial) reserves.” In 2012, Beijing launched the “Measures for the Management of Special Funds for the Adjustment and Upgrade of the Rare Earth Industry.” This included a special fund to support rare earth mining and processing as well as research and development (R&D), promotion of standards, industrialization of new technologies, and construction of public technical service platforms.
In 2016, then-Premier Wen Jiabao chaired an executive meeting of the State Council to study and promote the rare earth industry. The result was the “Rare Earth Industry Development Plan (2016-2020),” issued by MIIT in June 2016. “The major industrialized countries attach great importance to the strategic value of rare earths and the development and application of related fields,” the plan observed. It laid out a program to further consolidate China’s rare earth industry, “strengthen the protection of rare earth strategic resources, standardize rare earth mining, expand development of rare earth high-end applications, and give full play to the strategic value and supporting role of rare earths.” The plan stipulated that the annual output of rare earths would not exceed 140,000 tons.
The plan also called for the strengthening of “rare earth international cooperation.” Beijing would “promote rare earth enterprises to Go Out and cooperate in the development of overseas resources and deep processing of products.” The Chinese government would also “encourage rare earth companies to cooperate with overseas new material companies and technology research and development institutions.” In doing so, Beijing would internationalize its rare earth standards and further strengthen its grip on the industry.
China’s Dominance of the Industry Today and the Challenge for U.S. Policy
Chinese leaders continue to frame rare earths as a viable tool for coercive geopolitical effect, including vis-a-vis the United States. Chinese sources are explicit about how Beijing can use rare earths coercively in response to geopolitical disputes as a complement to China’s political, military, and diplomatic levers of power. A Chinese government-funded project on rare earth industrial policy concluded in 2019 that China should not rule out using rare earth exports as leverage amidst trade tensions with the United States. Chinese press sources touted Beijing’s decision to sanction Lockheed Martin in July 2020 as a step in this direction. Chinese scholar Jin Canrong has continually emphasized that Beijing’s ability to restrict rare earth exports and manipulate the rare earth market amounts to a “trump card” that can bankrupt U.S. rare earth operations, greatly diminish the viability of downstream industrial development, and shift China from a position of net import dependence in key areas (such as semiconductors) to a position as a market-leading net exporter.
China’s rare earth industry also features significant government subsidization and tax treatment, which have long been part of Beijing’s strategy. Research on the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, for example, shows that from 2016 to 2018, “the state’s supporting funds have provided about 4 billion RMB… In this way, the accounting costs of rare earth raw materials for enterprises can be offset.”
While China today accounts for approximately 70 percent of the world’s rare earth reserves, U.S. and allied dependence is even more acute in the refining of rare earths. Even as U.S. companies expand mining capacity domestically, the United States currently has no domestic refining capability. By contrast, China controls about 80 percent of global refining capacity. Efforts underway to develop commercial partnerships moving downstream toward processing oxides and alloys and producing permanent magnets offer promise. But against this backdrop, Chinese industry analysts dismiss U.S. efforts to expand domestic and allied production and refining capacity. “Don’t worry,” notes one report on global rare earth developments. “After 50 years of development, China has become the dominant supplier, and global reserves have declined.” China’s state-owned Global Times similarly called U.S. efforts to improve access to critical minerals “wishful thinking” in 2020.
Other commentaries point out the weakness of U.S. and allied operations that depend upon Chinese sources for processing, magnet production, and capital. According to one Chinese assessment, projects backed by the U.S. government “contain less heavy rare earths, and their procurement and production costs are still not comparable to those of China.” Thus, the conclusion is that “the future prospects are not promising” for U.S. efforts to offset Chinese rare earth dominance. This Chinese confidence is likely bolstered by the reality that at present, capital expenditure and regulatory requirements burden U.S. production facilities with significantly higher costs and longer timelines to reach full operating capacity relative to Chinese peers.
A Path Forward
The U.S. government and private sector and their international partners need to understand the scope of China’s rare earth threat. Building a rare earth supply chain from “mines to magnets” will be insufficient in the face of Beijing’s longstanding and holistic industrial policy. China seeks to leverage its role in related capital markets that support every step of the supply chain. Beijing also prioritizes seizing control of machinery and equipment markets at upstream stages of extraction. And most important, from the Chinese perspective, is China’s dominance in downstream manufacturing of permanent magnets — a role that yields influence over magnet producers and, indirectly, the mines that support them.
Given the scope of China’s positioning, the U.S. government must incentivize and reward private-sector and multilateral investments in wholly independent, trusted supply lines. That independence should apply across sourcing, processing, and financial backing. And the U.S. government should signal resolve in terms of supporting the scope and longevity of such initiatives. Clear public messaging and policy support for trusted critical mineral supply chains are necessary first steps for activating the enduring U.S. advantage of an innovative private sector.
Beijing’s industrial champions enjoy coercive leverage in every significant global market for rare earths, from the United States to Australia and from Greenland to Myanmar. The deficiency of the American response is apparent to our adversaries. Thus, the United States needs to develop both offensive and defensive measures that promote a competitive market and better operational conditions. The U.S. government should adopt an industrial policy that includes stockpiling military-related rare earths, preferential tax policies, and national security and operational security reviews of actors at every stage of the supply chain. Those policies should produce engagement with like-minded democratic allies and partners, such as the United Kingdom, the European Union, Japan, and Taiwan, which face the same supply chain security risks as the United States. Allies and partners with robust extractive industry sectors, such as Australia and Canada, should be prioritized for the unique, trusted contributions they offer to critical rare earth supply lines.
Recommendations
A responsive U.S. strategy should focus on four mutually reinforcing lines of effort:
- defending critical military supply chains through a dedicated and aggressive stockpiling program managed by DoD;
- activating the power of the U.S. private sector through a program of tax incentives legislated by Congress and building upon commitments authorized under the Defense Production Act;
- competing internationally in a strategic fashion under the leadership of the State Department; and
- directly imposing costs on China’s rare earth sector through financial statecraft and military strategy.
The goal should be for the United States to overtake China as the world’s leading rare earth producer and consumer within the next 10 years — matching Beijing’s current pricing power and dominance in the rare earth industry. The immediate task of building a stockpile of military-relevant rare earths will serve as the pacing activity in the lines of effort detailed below. Beyond the immediate and obvious security dividends, this strategy should also produce benefits in terms of technological development, environmental impact, and defense of human rights.
Defending in Depth: Building a Stockpile of Military-Relevant Rare Earths
A necessary — but insufficient — first step to be taken in any worthwhile U.S. rare earth strategy is defensive. The U.S. government must guarantee access to rare earths needed for critical U.S. defense industrial and research purposes. At a minimum, the federal government, operating through the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) and the procurement authorities of the military services, combatant commands, and other relevant entities across the interagency, should establish a stockpiling program to guarantee supply to major defense acquisition programs (MDAPs). The MDAP portfolio includes DoD’s largest acquisition programs, such as the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and the Army’s Armored Multi-Purpose Vehicle. This stockpiling effort should start downstream with electric motors and rare earth permanent magnets, with the goal of securing a stockpile sufficient to satisfy demand from MDAPs included in the five-year Future Years Defense Program. After an initial two-year phase, the stockpiling effort should gradually work its way upstream to metal alloys and select rare earth oxides necessary for neodymium magnets. DoD should fund and manage the program covering magnets, alloys, and oxides at specifications required by specific manufacturers and weapons systems, with an expectation to reach initial operational capability by year three and full capacity by year five.
In its initial two-year phase, the stockpiling effort should prioritize domestic supply wherever possible and with consideration for supply partnerships that are economically viable independent of DoD support. After that phase, the program should shift to rigid domestic-content requirements (that is, “buy American” provisions). Relevant oversight committees in Congress should oversee the stockpiling effort and receive quarterly progress updates from the secretary of defense. Once the program reaches an operational capability sufficient to support five years of MDAP demand, it should be briefed to broader congressional and executive audiences on an unclassified basis.
Concurrently, DoD should collaborate with MDAP prime contractors to require similar stockpiling by companies to guarantee domestic control of supplies at the program level. Given the strategic importance of military-specific supply chains and their centrality to strategic competition with China, the United States should pursue redundancy by complementing the government stockpile with a parallel system backed by the defense industrial base. The private-sector stockpile could aim to stockpile enough rare earths to sustain one year of production. This requirement should be included in annual procurement contracts with the U.S. government and should be formally hardwired into MDAP procurements as Key Performance Parameters. The Pentagon’s Joint Requirements Oversight Council should be tasked with reviewing rare earth permanent magnet dependencies in programs that fall below the MDAP threshold. The DLA should be tasked with vetting company-managed stockpiles and should report to congressional oversight authorities annually.
While the DoD and private-sector stockpiling programs are stood up, interim measures will be necessary to address market dependency. The Department of the Interior, the Department of Energy, and the Small Business Administration should form and invest in a rare earth-focused private market investment fund to hedge against and profit from price fluctuations. The Small Business Investment Company model could be pursued for this effort. This fund’s mandate should sunset upon the full realization of the DoD stockpiling program, after which point the proceeds should be returned to the Treasury or converted into a privately owned rare earth element oxide stockpile.
This will be an expensive endeavor. The global rare earth permanent magnet market is valued at over $14 billion per year. Collectively, the stockpiling efforts proposed here should be receive an annual budget of over half that value, at a minimum, for a period of five years. China’s current positioning and pricing power will require this outlay if Washington is to overcome Beijing’s near-certain attempts to block U.S. stockpiling efforts. Indeed, this significant investment is necessary to secure the U.S. defense industrial base. New modes of public-private partnership, information sharing, and potential risk sharing may be necessary given that such an ambitious and expedited effort could produce unintended market effects.
Finally, Congress should require the executive branch to submit classified progress reports. Upon attainment of satisfactory benchmarks, Congress should impose domestic-content requirements for future MDAPs, with no consumptive demand exemption loopholes that allow industrial base actors to delay investments necessary for securing their supply chains.
Activating the Private Sector
The U.S. private sector is Washington’s greatest advantage over Beijing. China’s “state-led, enterprise-driven” economic model is adept at applying proven approaches and leveraging scale to accrue leverage across economic interactions. By contrast, the U.S. system’s relative advantage lies not in attempts at top-down control, but in unleashing the creative forces of industry to devise innovative technologies and processes. In the context of critical minerals, opportunities exist at every stage of the value chain for advances to decrease costs, lessen environmental impact, and increase performance. Similar opportunities exist for industry to develop novel solutions — whether in materials science or manufacturing — encouraged by the rewards offered by free-market competition. China’s system is not optimal for seizing those opportunities. But nor is the U.S. government’s current approach. An optimal approach can be found on the factory floor and in the hands of appropriately incentivized U.S. industry.
The United States also possesses a natural resource endowment that should provide a foundation for competitive positioning. That endowment could help provide global pricing power if paired with the U.S. market’s strengths. The power of downstream equipment manufacturers in the United States (for example, in the aerospace, automotive, and medical device industries), along with the power of the U.S. consumer market, could be determinative in reshaping the global rare earth landscape if those producers receive cost-competitive, innovative, and environmentally friendly inputs from U.S. and allied rare earth and critical mineral supply lines. Recently announced investments, such as those by General Motors and Ford, are positive steps toward realizing secure supply chains in key commercial domains. Procurement decisions and resource allocations by downstream champions across key industrial sectors should be the guiding metric for U.S. policy aiming to spur on the private sector.
Tax credits can serve as a foundation for government action that can motivate the private sector and encourage development of the domestic supply chain. For example, the Oil Depletion Allowance tax law should be amended so that treatment of rare earth elements qualifies for the highest deductions permitted under Internal Revenue Code 613(b). Additional production tax credits should be authorized for each subsequent link in the supply chain, with prioritization of domestic content, as modeled in the Rare Earth Magnet Manufacturing Production Tax Credit Act of 2021. These credits should not phase out. As with any tax incentive, due diligence will be necessary to distinguish qualified recipients from those seeking to game the system.
In addition, the Defense Production Act (DPA) should be deployed to incentivize rare earth extraction projects in the United States. Rather than executing an ad hoc grant funding scheme, the DLA should use its DPA Title III authority to guarantee purchase of select rare earth oxides needed for neodymium magnets from any U.S.-based mine to satisfy the aforementioned MDAP-focused stockpiling program. This assurance of funding should enable economically viable projects to raise private capital without generating dependence on government support.
DPA Title III funding should also be considered for supply chain nodes where U.S. industry has yet to scale. Immediate targets could include metal alloy development and permanent magnet production. All DPA Title III funding recipients should be required to generate and implement sustainability and recycling programs to mitigate environmental impacts. The targets for such programs should be developed by the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, and the Interior Department.
Research and development funding should also play a role. But government funding should focus on application-ready investments capable of achieving commercially relevant scale and sustainability. Ultimately, a combination of robust tax incentives and validated downstream commercial demand will generate private-capital interest in more high-risk research that may generate revolutionary advances. The U.S. government should not aim to pick winners. It should only seed, at a small scale and in a limited set, application-specific cases. The DLA’s recent Small Business Innovation Research solicitation focused on “Development and Qualification of Domestically Sintered Neodymium Iron Boron Magnets for Weapons Platforms” provides an instructive example wherein R&D funds are targeted toward direct, immediate applications. Funding of this nature should increase modestly over the next decade, and the Energy, Commerce, Transportation, Interior, and Defense departments should pursue a more diverse set of funding mechanisms while tax incentives at both the federal and state levels unleash the power of the private sector.
The U.S. government’s approach to activating private-sector forces should also address environmental impacts. The Department of Energy’s Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant Program should be scoped to support state and local efforts that contribute to upstream rare earth production relevant to the automotive industry and broader transportation sector. Moving beyond the two-year milestone of the MDAP stockpiling program, the departments of Energy and the Interior should offer R&D funding to incentivize the U.S. science and technology community to focus on mitigating environmental impacts and supporting sustainable rare earth mining, production, and recycling processes. The environmental impact of rare earth separation and processing should not be ignored, but it also should not be blindly offshored and discounted.
Internationalizing the Competition
Another area of U.S. strategic advantage vis-a-vis China is Washington’s network of allies and partners. The U.S. government should cultivate international partnerships to solve the rare earth challenge. This effort should be led by the State Department, which has the requisite footprint and authorities to engage credibly with critical allies and partners. State’s Policy Planning Staff could lead strategic planning for this effort, in coordination with the under secretary for economic growth, energy, and the environment. The department could also leverage the institutional capacities of the Bureau of Energy Resources and the Global Engagement Center. Existing efforts such as the U.S.-Canada Critical Minerals Working Group and the Energy Resource Governance Initiative provide a foundation for partner engagement. The State Department should also leverage its authorities concerning foreign investment and export controls to encourage increased coordination across the interagency as well as with key partners abroad to help protect their strategic resources and technology. The State Department’s international engagement would benefit also from inclusion of U.S. private-sector perspectives and from active coordination with export and overseas investment activities, such as those of the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation.
The State Department must encourage allies with upstream production capacity, such as Australia, to restrict Chinese investment. Greenland stands out as another potential producer that should be courted diplomatically and economically. Key nodes along the supply chain — from equipment for extraction and processing to raw material extraction, alloy processing, magnet production, and recycling — should be identified and supported through multilateral and bilateral engagement. The Critical Materials Institute at Ames Laboratory and the National Energy Technology Laboratory should each be tasked with supporting international partnership development efforts consistent with their research portfolios. And the secretary of state should develop a rare earth supply chain diplomatic strategy to inform resource allocations. Such a strategy can be implemented by interagency actors ranging from the U.S. Agency for International Development to the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industrial Security.
The U.S. engagement strategy must recognize the markets where U.S. investments redound to China’s benefit. Malaysia stands out as a prominent potential case: While an important contributor to global separation and processing activities, Malaysia’s industrial sector is co-opted by Chinese interests and might need to be jettisoned from U.S. supply chains. Myanmar is a potentially similar case, where complicated diplomatic dynamics demand additional consideration. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) should be tasked with conducting a divestment study focused on the regions, states, and territories where U.S. investments would be ineffective. ODNI should also generate a detailed map of Chinese influence in rare earth supply chains outside China. Risks associated with indirect exposure to Chinese interests in places such as Malaysia and Myanmar should be incorporated into U.S. government vetting of rare earth supply chain security.
On a more tactical level, the U.S. Export-Import Bank should prioritize critical mineral relationships within its China program and its Council on China Competition. U.S. diplomatic efforts should incorporate the critical mineral and rare earth supply chains as key priorities for collaboration with upstream sources as well as downstream partners for rare earth mines, processors, and magnet manufacturers in the United States. Key fora for engagement should include, but not be limited to, the U.S.-EU Trade and Technology Council, the National Technology and Industrial Base system, and the European Raw Materials Alliance.
Imposing Costs in the Market and Through Military Strategy
As Washington achieves a more secure position in rare earths, it must also identify Chinese weaknesses and vulnerabilities that the United States and its allies and partners could leverage.
China wields a robust system of domestic production controls, export management, and both direct and indirect control of overseas production sites to influence global prices and markets. The U.S. government can offset these efforts through both market and military maneuvers. For example, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) should prioritize review of Chinese-tied critical mineral investments in the United States, with a focus on the indirect routes by which Chinese capital can secure equity in relevant operations. As downstream capacity for production of permanent magnets and corresponding rare earth oxides and alloys expands in the United States, oversight and regulation of the industry should be tailored in line with outbound review frameworks, such as those in the proposed National Critical Capabilities Defense Act. Industrial innovations, capacity, and equipment developed in the United States should be protected from both licit and illicit Chinese access in a manner consistent with supply chains in other critical industries, such as the semiconductor industry. Protections against Chinese access should be sequenced so as not to impede near- to intermediate-term progress in defense-specific stockpiling. Eventual implementation of outbound security reviews should follow a transparent system of assessment and waiver consideration similar to the “buy American” provisions in the Infrastructure and Investment Jobs Act, which President Biden signed into law in November 2021. Collaboration with democratic allies and partners should similarly prioritize coordination of investment screening and industrial security and intellectual property protection throughout critical minerals sectors.
China’s rare earth industry players should be sanctioned in accordance with relevant Treasury and DoD listing processes and the methodology specified by Section 1260H of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021. Any subsidiaries or joint ventures connected to these entities should also be delisted from U.S. exchanges in accordance with Executive Order 13959 of November 2020 and should be prohibited from raising capital from public or private equity and debt markets in the United States or from U.S. persons. The U.S. government should use its authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to seize assets associated with any Chinese rare earth companies that are affiliated with China’s military or military-civil fusion strategy and operate in the United States. These actions should be sequenced to maximize market recognition of U.S. competitiveness and U.S. intent to overtake China in the rare earth sector.
Military and operational national security strategy should also be informed by this ambition. The U.S. military must plan for kinetic scenarios that may introduce risk to critical supply chains. The U.S. military’s power projection capabilities may also serve as valuable tools for cost imposition. The U.S. Air Force’s targeteers should be tasked with generating operational plans for striking key rare earth element extraction sites in mainland China, production facilities associated with China’s rare earth players, smaller extractors that are politically connected in China, key storage depots, and production hubs used for building equipment for separation, processing, and magnet production in mainland China or even under Chinese control abroad. These plans should be developed at a classified level.
The U.S. Navy’s planners should be tasked with structuring exercises focused on interdictions and blockades of rare earth supply lines from external points such as Australia and Greenland. U.S. Army planners should explore similar scenarios involving land-based supply lines of critical minerals and rare earths from Afghanistan and Myanmar. U.S. Special Operations Command should oversee a similar set of exercises focused on disruption of rare earth-relevant facilities in mainland China or under Chinese control and operation abroad. These exercises should be conducted in unclassified settings, with the results briefed to Congress and the executive branch.
U.S. values and democratic norms should permeate America’s rare earth strategy. The State Department and intelligence community should support domestic Chinese rights activists, such as those in Inner Mongolia, who have protested the CCP’s abuse of their local population and environment for the benefit of rare earth extraction or production. The U.S. ambassador in Beijing, for example, could visit these populations or include them in economic- and climate-focused policy events held at the U.S. embassy. The U.S. government should also encourage international fora that amplify the voices of non-governmental organizations that monitor China’s environmental, social, and governance abuses connected to the rare earth industry. Relatedly, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection system should investigate forced labor in Chinese-dominated rare earth supply chains and apply Withhold Release Orders and seizure authorities against Chinese products implicated in prison or forced-labor schemes, which are pervasive in China’s industrial policy support mechanisms.
Finally, Congress should consider barring the importation of critical materials derived from Beijing’s forced labor regime, by designating them as tied to an emergency humanitarian crisis under Section 307 of the United States Tariff Act of 1930. This would follow the precedent set by similar measures enacted in 2010 through the Dodd-Frank Act. Congress should also task the Securities and Exchange Commission with requiring that companies listed on U.S. stock exchanges disclose supply chain ties t entities that may be linked to Beijing’s industrial policy that violates human rights norms. Ultimately, increased transparency should motivate downstream consumers in the United States to comply with legal restrictions that target human rights abusers abroad.
Conclusion
The United States possesses the tools and resource endowment to compete with China in the rare earth domain. To do so, America must unleash the power of its private sector. But Washington must also advance a positive technological, environmental, and human rights vision for the rare earth sector. Time is of the essence.
FDD values diversity of opinion and the independent views of its scholars, fellows, and board members. The views of the authors do not necessarily reflect the views of FDD, its staff, or its advisors.
- Notes
- Wang Denghong, “关键矿产的研究意义、矿种厘定、资源属性、找矿进展、存在问题及主攻方向 [Research Significance of Key Minerals, Determination of Mineral Types, Resource Attributes, Prospecting Progress, Existing Problems and Main Direction of Attack],” Acta Geologica Sinica, 2019.
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U.S. Department of Defense, “Assessing and Strengthening the Manufacturing and Defense Industrial Base and Supply Chain Resiliency of the United States: Report to President Donald J. Trump by the Interagency Task Force in Fulfillment of Executive Order 13806,” September 2018, page 96. (https://media.defense.gov/2018/Oct/05/2002048904/-1/-1/1/ASSESSING-AND-STRENGTHENING-THE-MANUFACTURING-AND%20DEFENSE-INDUSTRIAL-BASE-AND-SUPPLY-CHAIN-RESILIENCY.PDF)
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Executive Order 14017, “America’s Supply Chains,” February 24, 2021. (https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2021/02/24/executive-order-on-americas-supply-chains). The order instructed DoD to “submit a report identifying risks in the supply chain for critical minerals and other identified strategic materials, including rare earth elements (as determined by the Secretary of Defense), and policy recommendations to address these risks.” The Pentagon submitted that report to the National Security Council on June 4.
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The White House, “Building Resilient Supply Chains, Revitalizing American Manufacturing, and Fostering Broad-Based Growth: 100-Day Reviews under Executive Order 14017,” June 2021. (https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/100-day-supply-chain-review-report.pdf)
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Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021, §7003, Pub. L. 116-260, 134 Stat. 2419–2420. (https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/133/text)
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Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, §40206, Pub. L. 117-58, 135 Stat. 961–963. (https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/3684/text)
-
See: Robert Looney, “The Rare Earth Conundrum,” Milken Institute Review, February 23, 2021. (https://www.milkenreview.org/articles/the-rare-earth-conundrum)
- Distinguishing between “light” and “heavy” rare earth elements is an inexact exercise; the two categories have varied over time. Generally, elements with atomic numbers above that of europium are classified as heavy. These include terbium, dysprosium, europium, holmium, erbium, thulium, ytterbium, and lutetium.
- “欧美用中国稀土支撑起先进军工体系，却封锁中国 [Europe and the United States use Chinese rare earths to support advanced military systems, but China can block],” Sohu News (China), August 12, 2016.
-
For a thorough review of use cases, see: Larry Wortzel and Kate Selley, “Breaking China’s Stranglehold on the U.S. Rare Earth Elements Supply Chain,” American Foreign Policy Council, April 2021. (https://www.afpc.org/publications/policy-papers/breaking-chinas-stranglehold-on-the-u.s-rare-earth-elements-supply-chain)
- “中国会不会用稀土作为贸易战武器，限制出口惩罚美国？美专家解答 [Will China use rare earths as a trade war weapon to restrict exports and punish the United States?],” Beijing Weapons Magazine (China), February 27, 2021.
-
Mary Hui, “Why rare earth permanent magnets are vital to the global climate economy,” Quartz, May 14, 2021. (https://qz.com/1999894/why-rare-earth-magnets-are-vital-to-the-global-climate-economy)
-
David Kramer, “US government acts to reduce dependence on China for rare-earth magnets,” Physics Today, February 1, 2021. (https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/PT.3.4675)
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Liu Dacheng “21世纪的竞争，将是供应链与供应链之间的竞争 [The competition in the 21st century will be the competition between supply chains and supply chains],” Sohu News (China), April 20, 2020. (https://www.sohu.com/a/389637075_532789). See also: Gao Fengping et al., “国际稀土市场新格局与中国稀土产业战略选择 [New Pattern of International Rare Earth Market Share and Strategic Choice of China’s Rare Earth Industry],” International Trade Issues, 2019.
- Huo Zhijie, “我国第一个稀土生产工厂的创建及早期发展 (1953-1963) [The Establishment and Early Development of My Country’s First Rare Earth Production Plant (1953-1963)],” Dialectics of Nature, 2019.
- Yang Danhui, “资源安全、大国竞争与稀有矿产资源开发利用的国家战略 [National Strategy for Resource Safety, Competition among Major Powers, and Development and Utilization of Rare Mineral Resources],” Study and Exploration, 2018.
-
Zhang Hong, son-in-law of Deng Xiaoping, took over as the company’s chairman. See: John Tkacik, “Magnequench: CFIUS and China’s Third for US Defense Technology,” The Heritage Foundation, May 2, 2008. (https://www.heritage.org/asia/report/magnequench-cfius-and-chinas-thirst-us-defense-technology)
-
Neodymium magnets are necessary for everything from precision-guided missiles to advanced computer data storage. Magnequench supplied some 80 percent of neodymium and rare-earth oxide powders used in neodymium magnets globally. It also produced some 85 percent of the neodymium magnets used in U.S. precision-guided missiles. See: John Tkacik, “Magnequench: CFIUS and China’s Third for US Defense Technology,” The Heritage Foundation, May 2, 2008. (https://www.heritage.org/asia/report/magnequench-cfius-and-chinas-thirst-us-defense-technology)
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David Moberg, “Magnet Consolidation Threatens Both U.S. Jobs and Security,” In These Times, January 23, 2004. (https://inthesetimes.com/article/magnet-consolidation-threatens-both-us-jobs-and-security)
-
John Tkacik, “Magnequench: CFIUS and China’s Third for US Defense Technology,” The Heritage Foundation, May 2, 2008. (https://www.heritage.org/asia/report/magnequench-cfius-and-chinas-thirst-us-defense-technology)
- Wang Denghong, “战略性关键矿产相关问题探讨 [Discussion on Strategic Key Mineral Related Issues],” Chemical Mineral Geology, 2019.
- Cai Enze, “守护好中国稀土这一战略资源 [Protect China’s Rare Earth Strategic Resources],” Shanghai Enterprise, 2019.
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Keith Bradsher, “Amid Tension, China Blocks Vital Exports to Japan,” The New York Times, September 23, 2010. (https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/23/business/global/23rare.html)
-
Mari Yamaguchi, “Japan: China rare-earth ban could hurt economy,” Associated Press, September 28, 2010. (https://phys.org/news/2010-09-japan-china-rare-earth-economy.html). For more context on the impact and policy moves adopted by Japan in the aftermath, see: Mary Hui, “Japan’s global rare earths quest holds lessons for the US and Europe,” Quartz, April 23, 2021. (https://qz.com/1998773/japans-rare-earths-strategy-has-lessons-for-us-europe)
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“EU, US, Japan Launch Rare Earth WTO Case against China,” Reuters, March 3, 2012. (https://www.reuters.com/article/china-trade-eu/eu-us-japan-launch-rare-earth-wto-case-against-china-idUSB5E8DS01T20120313). “This just showed the importance of rare earths resources,” former Chinese political leader and industrial planner Cai Enze wrote in 2019. “China is engaged in the integration and control of rare earth resources and in the right way. It is an issue of national strategic interests.” See: Cai Enze, “守护好中国稀土这一战略资源 [Protect China’s rare earth strategic resources],” Shanghai Enterprise, 2019.
-
“China loses appeal of WTO ruling on exports of rare earths,” Reuters, August 7, 2014. (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-wto-rareearths/china-loses-appeal-of-wto-ruling-on-exports-of-rare-earths-idUSKBN0G71QD20140807)
- Gao Fengping, Zhang Pu, Liu Dacheng, and Xiu Da, “国际稀土市场新格局与中国稀土产业战略选择 [New pattern of international rare earth market and strategic choice of China’s rare earth industry],” International Trade Issues, 2019.
- Wang Denghong, “战略性关键矿产相关问题探讨 [Discussion on strategic key mineral related issues],” Chemical Mineral Geology, 2019.
- Gao Fengping, Zhang Pu, Liu Dacheng, and Xiu Da, “国际稀土市场新格局与中国稀土产业战略选择 [New pattern of international rare earth market and strategic choice of China’s rare earth industry],” International Trade Issues, 2019.
- PRC Ministry of Customs, “2019年出口许可证管理货物目录 [2019 Export License Management Goods Catalog],” 2018. It appears that Chinese trade strategists assume that this export license system is more likely to be continually accepted as compliant with WTO and other trade agreement requirements.
-
Emily de La Bruyère, “China’s Strategic Aims in Africa,” Testimony before the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, May 8, 2020. (https://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/de_La_Bruyere_Testimony.pdf)
-
See, for example: PRC Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, “Rare Earth Industry Development Plan (2016-2020),” June 29, 2016. Additional background can be found in a report the authors prepared for the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission: Emily de La Bruyère and Nathan Picarsic, “Two Markets, Two Resources: Documenting China’s Engagement in Africa,” Horizon Advisory, November 2020. (https://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/2020-11/Two_Markets_Two_Resources_Documenting_Chinas_Engagement_in_Africa.pdf)
- Zhou Ming and Liu Xiangling, “中国稀土生产、贸易与储备分析 [Analysis of Chinese rare earth production, trade and reserves],” Foreign Trade and Economics, 2017.
- The fund is jointly organized by the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. The former allocates the funds, and the latter determines strategic priorities. See: Wang Denghong, “战略性关键矿产相关问题探讨 [Discussion on strategic key mineral related issues],” Chemical Mineral Geology, 2019.
- PRC Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, “Rare Earth Industry Development Plan (2016-2020),” June 29, 2016.
- “中国稀土形势有多严峻？美国关停最大稀土矿，足够使用280年！ [How severe is the rare earth situation in China? The United States shut down the largest rare earth mine, enough for 280 years!]” Sohu News (China), May 22, 2019.
- Ibid.
- Gao Fengping et al., “国际稀土市场新格局与中国稀土产业战略选择 [New Pattern of International Rare Earth Market Share and Strategic Choice of China’s Rare Earth Industry],” International Trade Issues, 2019.
-
Liu Xuanzun, Chu Daye, and Tu Lei, “Lockheed Martin faces China’s sanctions over Taiwan deal: Response to Taiwan deal; May include Rare Earths,” Global Times (China), July 14, 2020. (https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1194528.shtml)
- “金灿荣：中国有3张王牌可以打赢贸易战 [Jin Canrong: China has 3 trump cards to win the trade war],” NetEase (China), June 8, 2021.
- See, for example: PRC State Taxation Administration, Announcement No. 17, “Announcement of the State Administration of Taxation on the Issues Concerning the Management of Chinese Character Anti-counterfeiting Projects for Invoices Issued by Rare Earth Enterprises in the Value-added Tax Anti-Counterfeiting Tax Control System,” May 16, 2012.
- Yang Zhencai et al., “中国战略资源进出口分析 [China Strategic Resources Import and Export Analysis],” Fortune Times (China), 2020.
- Cai Enze, “守护好中国稀土这一战略资源 [Protect China’s rare earth strategic resources],” Shanghai Enterprise, 2019.
-
This deficiency is increasingly recognized, and addressing processing and separation capacity is part of a range of U.S. government programs and private-sector efforts to make U.S. domestic resources economically viable. See, for example, the context around and justification for a relevant Department of Energy funding program: U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management, Press Release, “U.S. Department of Energy to Invest $28.35M in Advanced Processing of Rare Earth Elements and Critical Minerals for Industrial and Manufacturing Applications,” January 21, 2021. (https://www.energy.gov/fecm/articles/us-department-energy-invest-2835m-advanced-processing-rare-earth-elements-and-critical)
-
“China explores rare earth export curbs to target U.S. defence industry,” Reuters, February 16, 2021. (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-china-defence/china-explores-rare-earth-export-curbs-to-target-u-s-defence-industry-ft-idUSKBN2AG0C1)
- “废旧钕铁硼回收再造技术及发展状况” [Development Status of Foreign Nd-Fe-B Recycling Technology],” Industry Frontier, August 9, 2020.
-
“US Rare Earths Rise Wishful Thinking,” Global Times (China), September 6, 2020. (https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1200062.shtml)
- “美澳联手挑战中国稀土领域，业界不看好 [The U.S. and Australia join forces to challenge China’s rare earth sector, the industry is not optimistic],” Defense Times Pioneer (China), September 23, 2020.
-
“Rare Earth Magnet Market: Global Industry Trends, Share, Size, Growth, Opportunity and Forecast 2021-2026,” IMARC Group, 2020. (https://www.imarcgroup.com/rare-earth-magnet-manufacturing-plant)
-
Andrew Hawkins, “Ford reveals plans for massive EV and battery factories in the US,” The Verge, September 27, 2021. (https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/27/22696427/ford-ev-battery-factory-tennessee-kentucky-investment); Kristen Korosec, “GM locks in two deals that will bolster US rare earth magnet production,” TechCrunch, December 9, 2021. (https://techcrunch.com/2021/12/09/gm-rare-earth-magnet-us-supply-chain)
-
Coordination with and through strategies such as the “resilience-focused” approach advanced by the UK-based China Research Group offers a prime example of the opportunities available with American allies; “The UK and China: Critical Minerals,” China Research Group, November 2021. (https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5f75a6c74b43624d99382ab6/t/618aa4726e426d31e3545375/1636476019150/Policy+Brief+-+Critical+Minerals+-+China+Research+Group.pdf)
-
Larry Wortzel and Kate Selley, “Breaking China’s Stranglehold on the U.S. Rare Earth Elements Supply Chain,” American Foreign Policy Council, April 2021. (https://www.afpc.org/publications/policy-papers/breaking-chinas-stranglehold-on-the-u.s-rare-earth-elements-supply-chain)
-
Sibanye Gold’s 2017 acquisition of the Stillwater platinum group metal mining operation is an instructive example of a CFIUS failure that must be prevented moving forward. See: David McGlaughlin and Paul Burkhardt, “Sibanye Gets U.S. Security Nod to Buy Stillwater Mines,” Bloomberg, April 17, 2017. (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-04-17/sibanye-gets-u-s-security-nod-to-buy-stillwater-platinum-mines)
-
See, for example, the House version of this act, introduced in December 2021: Office of Representative Victoria Spartz, Press Release, “Spartz Introduces the National Critical Capabilities Defense Act,” December 21, 2021. (https://spartz.house.gov/media/press-releases/spartz-introduces-national-critical-capabilities-defense-act)
-
Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021, §11513, Pub. L. 117-58, 135 Stat. 595–596. (https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/3684/text)
-
William M. (Mac) Thornberry National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021, §1260H, Pub. L. 116-283, 134 Stat. 3965–3966. (https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/6395/text)
-
Executive Order 13959, “Addressing the Threat From Securities Investments That Finance Communist Chinese Military Companies,” November 17, 2020. (https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/presidential-actions/executive-order-addressing-threat-securities-investments-finance-communist-chinese-military-companies)
-
Section 40436 of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021 calls for a report in 120 days on the risks of forced labor in the electric vehicle supply chain. That provision tasks the secretary of energy with coordinating with the secretaries of state and commerce on such a report. Any infrastructure legislation that would invest public funds in the electric vehicle industry should include a similar provision. At the same time, ample foundation already exists in U.S. law to justify more immediate action to prevent the importation of goods made in whole or in part by forced or prison labor. See: Nathan Picarsic, “Risky Business: The Hidden Costs of EV Battery Raw Materials,” Automotive World, November 23, 2021. (https://www.automotiveworld.com/articles/risky-business-the-hidden-costs-of-ev-battery-raw-materials)
-
“Section 307 and Imports Produced by Forced Labor,” Congressional Research Service, December 27, 2021. (https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF11360)
-
Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010, §1502, Pub. L. 111-203, 124 Stat. 2213–2218. (https://www.congress.gov/111/plaws/publ203/PLAW-111publ203.pdf)
fdd.org · by Emily de La Bruyère Senior Fellow · February 10, 2022
19. FDD Announces New Class For Its 2022 National Security Fellows Program
FDD Announces New Class For Its 2022 National Security Fellows Program
WASHINGTON, D.C., February 10, 2022 – The Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) announced its class of 2022 National Security Fellows. The class is comprised of bipartisan, mid-career, national-security practitioners with a wide range of experience in government, the military, communications, and the private sector.
FDD’s National Security Fellows Program (NSFP) provides exclusive opportunities to mid-career national security professionals, combining mentorship by FDD experts with year-long programming that includes off-the-record conversations with high-level government officials, policy experts and ambassadors, leadership development skill-building workshops and networking opportunities. The fellows discuss pressing national security issues such as global terrorist networks, cyber warfare, great power competition, and the role of the U.S. in the Middle East. They also participate in practical skill-building and leadership development workshops.
This year’s class includes congressional staffers, executive branch officials, members of the military, national security attorneys, political commentators, consultants, and experts from think tanks. They join FDD’s distinct National Security Alumni Network community of over 500 mid-career national security practitioners.
“We are proud to welcome this exceptionally talented group of bipartisan national security practitioners into our fellows program and national security community,” said FDD’s Founder and President Clifford D. May. “The members of this year’s class come from diverse professional and political backgrounds. Each fellow has a unique commitment to U.S. leadership and national security. Investing in mid-career national security practitioners is a key component of FDD’s strategic mission and we look forward to providing them with opportunities that will help them rise through the ranks in their careers.”
2022 National Security Fellows
- Lance Adsit, U.S. Air Force
- Frederico Bartels, The Heritage Foundation
- Derek Bernsen, U.S. Navy
- Thomas Boodry, Office of Representative Tony Gonzales (R-TX)
- Max Castroparedes, Harvard Belfer Center
- Katelyn Christ, Bureau of Industry and Security, U.S. Department of Commerce
- Claire Chu, RWR Advisory Group
- Katherine Close, Office of Representative Lois Frankel (D-FL)
- Alyssa Farah, CNN Political Commentator
- Anthony Ferrara, U.S. Air Force
- Gavy Friedson, United (Rescue) Hatzalah Israel
- Corrine Geiger, U.S. Department of Defense
- Jordan Gray, U.S. Army
- Kerri Gray, Booz Allen Hamilton
- Cody Griner, Deloitte
- Mena Hanna, Office of Representative Jeff Fortenberry (R-NE)
- Haisam Hassanein, Washington Institute for Near East Policy
- Dylan Jones, U.S. Department of Defense
- Laura Keenan, U.S. Army
- Brian Leitzke, U.S. Air Force
- Hannah Lincoln, Thresher Ventures
- Kimberly Mallard-Brown, U.S. Army
- Anthony Pandolfi, U.S. Marine Corps
- Nick Polk, Office of the Federal CIO at Office of Management and Budget
- Ryan Raybould, Office of Senator John Cornyn (R-TX)
- Libbie Shah, U.S. Air Force
- Gregory Smith, American Global Strategies
- John Speed Meyers, IQT Labs
- Alexa Walker, U.S. House of Representatives – Republican Study Committee
- Treston Wheat, Milestone Technologies
- Nadia Zarinkia, U.S. Department of Homeland Security
##
About the Foundation for Defense of Democracies:
The Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) is a Washington, DC-based nonpartisan policy institute focusing on national security and foreign policy. Connect with FDD on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.
20. Biden Pays Army Salaries to Iranian Ally
Conclusion:
If Congress allows it to stand, the Biden administration’s new precedent will severely damage the FMF and INCLE programs by turning them into slush funds for financing nation-building projects in Iranian-controlled satrapies and beyond, and possibly even making the United States complicit in financing terrorism.
FDD | Biden Pays Army Salaries to Iranian Ally
An unprecedented new salary assistance program for the Lebanese military is ‘cleverly’ structured to evade U.S. law
fdd.org · by Tony Badran Research Fellow · February 9, 2022
As part of its policy of pouring taxpayer money into Hezbollah-dominated Lebanon, the Biden administration notified Congress late last month that it was repurposing $67 million in aid to the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) in order to provide them with “livelihood support.” Less than a week later, the administration followed with another notification, which has not yet been reported, that it was repurposing a separate $16.5 million, also for “livelihood support,” to Lebanon’s Internal Security Forces (ISF). With this action, the administration is stretching standard U.S. practice pertaining to longstanding foreign assistance programs beyond all recognition, and abusing the authorities Congress has provided them. More troubling still, by injecting nearly $84 million into Lebanon with no ability to oversee how it ultimately gets spent, the administration could very well entangle the United States in terrorism financing.
For months now, the administration, spearheaded by the U.S. ambassador in Lebanon, has been broadcasting its intention to help the LAF and other Lebanese security agencies pay their salaries. The $67 million in Foreign Military Financing (FMF) was first announced last October by Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland during her visit to Beirut. That announcement was the latest in the administration’s quest for what it called “creative ways” to subsidize LAF expenditures, including mining for every available penny in order to help free up the LAF’s budget. As such, the bulk of the $67 million was reprogrammed from FY 2016 FMF funds for Pakistan that Congress was notified about in August 2017.
When it notified Congress about the reprogramming in September 2021, the Biden administration did not disclose that the purpose was to supplement LAF salaries. Instead, the nonpublic notification, which Tablet has viewed, mentioned funds “specifically intended for lethal military equipment” and that would also “help provide sustainment and training for some of this equipment.” The U.S. FMF program authorizes the President “to procure defense articles and services to enhance the capacity of foreign security forces.” It says nothing about directly supplementing the salaries of a foreign military, as even advocates of the aid policy have acknowledged. But the administration is intent on setting a new precedent.
Perhaps aware that it’s blowing up established practice, the administration’s January notification to Congress that it would “expand the program content” to provide “livelihood support” does not include an explanation of how the funds will be disbursed. The ambiguity likely stems from the fact that FMF funds were never designed to be used in this manner. (Funding for Afghan National Army salaries, for example, was authorized under the Afghanistan Security Forces Fund—a specifically legislated case).
To get a better sense of the administration’s explicit intention, consider its February notification to Congress for International Narcotics Control and Law Enforcement (INCLE) funds to Lebanon’s ISF. This nonpublic notification, which Tablet has also seen, changed the program content for $16.5 million pulled together from FY 2015 to FY 2020 INCLE funds, also to provide “livelihood support.” The notification clarifies that this will offer “approximately $100 per month” to eligible ISF members. As it happens, on Jan. 19, the LAF Directorate of Intelligence, which works closely with Hezbollah, issued a directive to officers to inform personnel that they would be receiving installments of financial assistance in U.S. dollars.
The administration and its supporters among Lebanon-affiliated advocates, think-tankers, and consultants have been discussing and advocating various scenarios for such cash injections. One scheme reportedly under consideration involved disbursing monthly stipends through a U.N.-managed fund totaling, in a remarkable coincidence, roughly the same amount of $86 million a year.
For now, the administration appears to have settled on stretching “military financing” well beyond its statutory definition so as to use it for whatever the White House and State Department desire, with no regard to whether such use is intended by Congress. Language like “livelihood support” belongs in programs like the U.S. Agency for International Development, not FMF or even INCLE, which are meant to fund equipment and training. By blurring this line, the administration has created a dangerous precedent that will invite abuse.
Still more remarkable is the administration’s decision to establish this globally significant precedent in, of all places, Lebanon—where the financial system is soaked in Hezbollah money laundering and financial crimes, and just about every facet of life is touched by Hezbollah activities. There are reportedly 80,000 uniformed personnel in the LAF and some 28,000 in the ISF. It is impossible that the administration will vet all these recipients of U.S. taxpayer dollars and their families. And because there are no controls, there is no way to know how these individuals will use the new cash.
Some amount of it could flow through Hezbollah exchange houses, or possibly be spent at Hezbollah-run businesses and retailers. Some might be used to pay outstanding loans to Hezbollah lenders (like the al-Qard al-Hassan Association). These are just a few possibilities, because there is simply no way the U.S. government will be able to certify that none of its $84 million in fungible cash donations will have found its way to the terror group that dominates Lebanon and permeates its economy.
If Congress allows it to stand, the Biden administration’s new precedent will severely damage the FMF and INCLE programs by turning them into slush funds for financing nation-building projects in Iranian-controlled satrapies and beyond, and possibly even making the United States complicit in financing terrorism.
Tony Badran is Tablet magazine’s Levant analyst and a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He tweets @AcrossTheBay. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
fdd.org · by Tony Badran Research Fellow · February 9, 2022
21. As Other Hot Spots Boil, U.S. Shows Its Foreign Policy Focus Is Asia
Again, the greatest strategic failure of the 21st Century is arguably our withdrawal from TPP.
Excerpts:
Ms. Patton said that Australia saw the Quad as further integrating the United States into a strategic role in the region and committing it to continuing what President Barack Obama called a “pivot to Asia,” away from the long-running and costly wars of the Middle East and Central Asia.
However, she said it was important that Washington come up with a comprehensive plan for economic engagement in the Asia-Pacific region. Mr. Obama had intended for the proposed 12-nation trade pact called the Trans-Pacific Partnership to do that, but President Donald J. Trump blocked any American role in the agreement. And within the Democratic Party, Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and other progressive politicians had denounced the pact, saying it would harm American workers.
Mr. Obama and Mr. Biden, when he was vice president, argued that the pact would help raise environmental and labor standards across Asia and give the member nations alternative trading partners to China, which had not been a founding member.
Last September, with the United States absent from the trade agreement, China applied to join.
As Other Hot Spots Boil, U.S. Shows Its Foreign Policy Focus Is Asia
Feb. 11, 2022
Updated 4:46 a.m. ET
Antony Blinken’s Asia-Pacific trip during the crisis with Russia and Ukraine signals that the U.S. is committing to the world’s largest region — and to competition with China.
From left, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, the Australian foreign minister, Marise Payne, Prime Minister Scott Morrison of Australia, the Indian foreign minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, and the Japanese foreign minister, Hayashi Yoshimasa, in Melbourne, Australia, on Friday.
By
Feb. 11, 2022Updated 4:46 a.m. ET
MELBOURNE, Australia — With Europe bracing for the possibility of its biggest ground war in decades, the American secretary of state, Antony J. Blinken, took a 27-hour flight this week in the opposite direction.
On Friday, Mr. Blinken met with the foreign ministers of Australia, Japan and India at a summit in Melbourne of the four-nation coalition called the Quad. His message was clear: Despite crises in Ukraine and elsewhere in the world, the United States is committed to bolstering its presence across Asia and presenting a different vision of the future than the one offered by China.
“Countries deserve to have the freedom to work together and associate with whom they choose,” Mr. Blinken said as he stood alongside the other foreign ministers before their meeting on Friday afternoon.
Australia is only the first of three stops for Mr. Blinken, who is also scheduled to meet with foreign officials in Fiji and Hawaii. The weeklong trip to the farthest reaches of Asia and the Pacific shows the intensity with which the Biden administration wants to signal that the vast region is the most important focus of its foreign policy.
In late January, Mr. Blinken had to do shuttle diplomacy in Kyiv and other European cities to address Russia’s aggression toward Ukraine. Since then, President Vladimir V. Putin has continued massing troops along Russia’s border with Ukraine for what could be a deadly follow-up to his forceful annexation in 2014 of the Crimean Peninsula and incursion into eastern Ukraine. Mr. Blinken said at an evening news conference in Melbourne after the ministers had met that a Russian invasion could even occur before the end of the Winter Olympics in Beijing, an event at which Mr. Putin and President Xi Jinping of China issued a long joint statement in which they said the partnership of the two nations had “no limits.”
“We continue to see very troubling signs of Russian escalation, including new forces arriving at the Ukrainian border,” Mr. Blinken said.
Mr. Blinken, right, with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine during shuttle diplomacy in Kyiv last month.Credit...Pool photo by Alex Brandon
While Mr. Blinken and some of his foreign counterparts did discuss Russia and Ukraine, that was not the focus of their talks. The Quad, which has gained momentum in recent years after being established in 2007, is an important part of President Biden’s vision for countering China, which has a powerful economic presence in every corner of the globe and a growing military footprint in Asia and parts of the Indian Ocean. The coalition also seeks to address broad regional issues, and the ministers said they talked on Friday about climate change, Covid-19 vaccines, counterterrorism, regional infrastructure and repression in Myanmar, among other matters.
Mr. Biden has said he plans to strengthen the traditional alliances and partnerships of the United States and build up new ones. That is a stark contrast to the approach of the Trump administration, which, in its “America First” zeal, created strains with partner countries over issues such as trade and defense funding.
Leaders of the Quad nations have viewed China’s actions with growing anxiety in recent years, as Mr. Xi has become more aggressive in his foreign policy.
China has continued to assert its territorial claims to islands in the East China Sea that are known as the Diaoyu in China and the Senkaku in Japan, which administers the area. Chinese troops have clashed with the Indian military along the two nations’ border in the Himalayas. And Beijing has engaged in what some Western officials call “influence operations” in Australia, including building ties with politicians in the country.
At the same time, all these nations, as well as the United States, have deep economic ties with China, which presents a central dilemma in their relations with the Asian superpower.
The United States has agreed to help Australia build nuclear-powered submarines.Credit...Richard Wainwright/EPA, via Shutterstock
On the final leg of the 27-hour flight to Melbourne, after a refueling stop in Pago Pago, American Samoa, Mr. Blinken told reporters that he wanted to emphasize the Biden administration’s work with the Quad because the group was “very representative of what we’re doing in different ways around the world, which is building, energizing, driving different coalitions of countries focused on sometimes overlapping issues.”
That is a common refrain of officials in the Biden administration. In contrast to their predecessors in the Trump administration, they assert that America’s strength comes from its alliances and partnerships, and that this approach is more important than ever because of China’s enormous economic leverage.
Mr. Blinken’s trip “underscores just how important — and how challenging — it is for Washington to maintain focus on the Indo-Pacific,” said Charles Edel, Australia chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former official in policy planning at the State Department.
“The Quad was formed largely in response to China’s increasing use of military and economic coercion, and is meant to prove that democracies can deliver needed public goods across the region. There have been some major successes this year — particularly around vaccine distribution — but now the work, and the success, of the Quad depends on moving from conception phase to coordination and delivery,” he added.
A Japanese patrol plane in 2011 over disputed islets known as the Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China.
Australia, which the United States sees as a model for how smaller nations can stand up to a more aggressive China, has become particularly important to American officials as a cornerstone of the coalition and a regional defense and intelligence partner.
In contrast to European nations, Australia’s ties with the United States grew stronger during the Trump administration, and that has continued into the Biden administration. Last September, Mr. Biden announced a new security pact with Australia and Britain called Aukus and declared that the United States would help Australia build nuclear-powered submarines — a move that infuriated France, which had a lucrative deal with Australia to supply less-advanced submarines.
Chinese officials said at the time that the trilateral pact was “extremely irresponsible” and “seriously undermines regional peace and intensifies the arms race.”
On Wednesday, Global Times, a newspaper published by the Communist Party, struck a similar note in criticizing the meeting of the ministers in Melbourne. “The tone of the four Quad foreign ministers’ meeting scheduled for Friday in Australia is still based on ideological differences and a Cold War mentality,” it said in an article.
On Friday morning, Marise Payne, the Australian foreign minister, drew a sharp line between the influence of the United States in the region and that of China.
She said at the start of a meeting with Mr. Blinken that “more than one authoritarian regime is presenting itself in the current world climate as a challenge — the D.P.R.K., China as well.” Ms. Payne was using the formal name for North Korea, an ally of China that has conducted an alarming number of missile tests in recent weeks.
Ms. Payne said that China was among the authoritarian regimes presenting themselves as global challenges.Credit...Pool photo by Hamish Blair
“We strongly support U.S. leadership on those challenges,” she added.
When the leaders of the Quad nations met in Washington last September for their first ever in-person meeting, the nations issued a communiqué that listed seven broad areas of cooperation: Covid-19 and global health aid, infrastructure, climate change, people-to-people exchange and education, emerging technologies, cybersecurity and outer space.
The leaders had already said at a virtual summit in March that they would work together on delivering Covid-19 vaccines, and in September they said the goal was to donate 1.2 billion doses of vaccines worldwide, in addition to their commitments to a World Health Organization vaccine program. At the time, they said they had delivered nearly 79 million doses in the Asia-Pacific region.
“I think the most important thing is to maintain a sense of momentum on those topics,” said Susannah Patton, a research fellow and project director in the Power and Diplomacy Program at the Lowy Institute in Sydney, Australia.
Ms. Patton said that Australia saw the Quad as further integrating the United States into a strategic role in the region and committing it to continuing what President Barack Obama called a “pivot to Asia,” away from the long-running and costly wars of the Middle East and Central Asia.
The leaders of the Quad nations met in Washington last September.Credit...Sarahbeth Maney/The New York Times
However, she said it was important that Washington come up with a comprehensive plan for economic engagement in the Asia-Pacific region. Mr. Obama had intended for the proposed 12-nation trade pact called the Trans-Pacific Partnership to do that, but President Donald J. Trump blocked any American role in the agreement. And within the Democratic Party, Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and other progressive politicians had denounced the pact, saying it would harm American workers.
Mr. Obama and Mr. Biden, when he was vice president, argued that the pact would help raise environmental and labor standards across Asia and give the member nations alternative trading partners to China, which had not been a founding member.
Last September, with the United States absent from the trade agreement, China applied to join.
22. Ukrainian Civilians Don’t Want War But Are Ready to Fight
Excerpts:
Highly coordinated disinformation campaigns, cyber attacks targeting critical infrastructure and official websites, and attempts to infiltrate government positions are among the other ways Russia destabilizes its neighbor.
After enduring eight years of psychological and hybrid warfare, Ukrainians are exhausted but resolute. “We want to live in a peaceful country. We want to go to work. We want to go to the park with our kids,” said Ladyka, the journalist preparing to fight in the event of a Russian attack. “We don’t want any war. We just want this to stop. ”
“Ukrainians oppose Russian tyranny and fight for their independence every day. Ukrainians did not want and do not want to fight but we have no choice—we are forced to defend [our] young democracy and [our] values and [our] families,” said Ovcharenko, the blogger who took up arms to defend against Russian aggression in 2014. “We will continue to fight.”
Ukrainian Civilians Don’t Want War But Are Ready to Fight
Russia’s 2014 aggression spurred a vigilant society.
Ukrainian civilians train as part of the country’s territorial defense program. (Photo by Ali Atmaca/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
When war began in Ukraine eight years ago, the speed and ferocity of the Russian advance found many—the provisional government in Kyiv foremost among them—wholly unprepared. Just days after ousted Ukrainian President President Viktor Yanukovych fled to Russia in the early hours of February, 22, 2014, Vladimir Putin’s now-infamous “little green men” moved into several strategic checkpoints and government buildings across the Crimean Peninsula.
Less than 10 months later and in close coordination with Kremlin-backed separtist movements in Donetsk and Luhansk, Putin launched a campaign of hybrid warfare in Ukraine’s eastern Donbass region. Despite attempts by the international community to impose ceasefires through the dubious Minsk accords, Ukraine’s fight against its neighbor to the north and local proxies persists.
But the Ukraine of today is not the Ukraine of 2014.
In the years since Putin’s invasion and annexation of Crimea, the Ukrainian military has expanded into one of the European continent’s largest, with more than 200,000 active duty troops and 900,000 reservists. Armed with advanced weaponry from NATO member states—including Turkish-made Bayraktar TB2 battle drones and Javelin antitank missiles—and trained by its Western partners, Kyiv’s fighting force would present Putin with a formidable opponent should he follow through with the tacit threat posed by the 130,000 Russian troops and accompanying military infrastructure concentrated near Ukraine’s borders.
And 2014 has taught Ukraine’s civilian population a hard-fought lesson in self-reliance. “Life was divided into before and after,” said Mykhailo Kulishov, a chef based in Bucha, near Kyiv. When it became clear the international community was unable to deter further aggression by Moscow, Ukrainians across the country purchased weapons, trained in urban warfare tactics, took first aid courses, and formed volunteer battalions. Their efforts have intensified amid Russia’s latest buildup.
A recent Western intelligence report, communicated to U.S. lawmakers last week, assessed that a full-scale attack by Russian forces (one that goes for the capital) could leave up to 50,000 civilians dead and trigger the flight of 1 million to 5 million refugees. The intel further estimated that between 5,000 and 25,000 Ukrainian soldiers and 3,000 to 10,000 Russian soldiers could wind up casualties in a Putin power play.
Moscow, for its part, rebuffed the now widely circulated report as “madness and scaremongering” on the part of Western media.
But actions speak louder than words, and Putin’s continued mobilization of key battalions and equipment makes it “far less likely that this is a bluff,” a Western intelligence official told NBC’s Richard Engel. Additional intel estimated that Russian ground forces, in coordination with airstrikes and cyber attacks, could topple Kyiv in a matter of days following an initial incursion.
With this “worst case scenario” in mind, Ukrainian civilians have begun to chart their next move: fight, flee, or hunker down. “We don’t panic. We just prepare,” said Olexiy Ladyka, an eastern Ukraine-based journalist for the Kramatorsk Post. “You have to understand that we’ve had the war for eight years. … It’s not something new for us and it’s not something strange for us.”
Ladyka and many others among Kramatorsk’s 150,000-plus population lived in the city during its occupation by Russian-backed militias in 2014. They have no desire to see history repeat itself. “It was a very strange world,” Ladyka, now 36, told The Dispatch. “A lot of my friends were put in prison [by the separatists]. One of them, we don’t know where he is. Maybe he was killed … eight years have passed since they took him and nobody’s seen him since that time.”
“I decided to join a local defense force,” he added. “In 2014, when the war started, a lot of people who never were soldiers … [became] soldiers. A lot of teachers and doctors, a lot of programmers—they went to the army and started to fight. They became good soldiers.”
Recent government estimates found that many of Ladyka’s countrymen and women—130,000 of them—have also volunteered to fight in territorial defense forces in cities and towns across Ukraine. Still others are preparing to fend off Russian occupation through guerrilla warfare, a tactic in which Ukrainians are well-versed after a bloody history of foreign invasions.
“We have been fighting for our independence for eight years and are already used to military news and the deaths of friends and friends of friends,” said Vitalii Ovcharenko, a blogger and activist who fought against Russian forces at the war’s start. “In the area where I live, bomb shelters are being prepared. Friends are discussing what we will do when the Russians launch a major attack. Soldiers [are] on the streets now more.”
Since it began in 2014, the conflict in eastern Ukraine has claimed more than 14,000 civilian and combatant lives. But in some areas, a relative calm has fallen over one-time conflict zones.
“By and large, life in Kramatorsk is not very different from ordinary life in other cities of Ukraine—shops are open, public transport runs, various objects are being built and reconstructed in the city,” Stanislav Chernohor, a Kramatorsk-based activist, told The Dispatch. “A small part of the people prepared backpacks and documents in case of evacuation, made arrangements with acquaintances in other parts of Ukraine so that they could go to them.”
While the 250-mile frontline remains quieter than in the past, the last three months have witnessed an uptick in sniper and mortar fire targeting Ukrainian forces as separatists in the Donbass gear up for the possibility of a Kremlin-led fight. On Monday, the head of the self-proclaimed “Donetsk People's Republic” (DPR) told Reuters that a full-scale war in the region could erupt at any time, in which case the group would not “rule out that we will be forced to turn to Russia if Ukraine, with the support of Western countries, passes a certain line.”
The thinly veiled threat dropped, not for the first time, the veneer of the rebels’ “independence” from their Russian backers. A DPR military commander reportedly made a more direct appeal to Moscow, requesting the deployment of 30,000 Russian troops to reinforce the frontline.
Fearing that Moscow will seize any pretext to move in, the Ukrainian side remains under strict orders from President Volodymyr Zelensky not to return fire. But Ukrainians know the situation could devolve at any moment regardless of Kyiv’s restraint.
“Escalation is only a matter of time, there have always been signs,” Kulishov, 30, told The Dispatch.
Fighting in the country’s east has already led to the internal displacement of more than 1.5 million people, compounding fears that another Russian incursion could set off a wholesale humanitarian crisis.
Chernohor, the blogger and activist, heads two Kramatorsk-based nonprofits. He said his teams developed contingency plans for the possibility of renewed combat. “We developed an evacuation plan, established collection points, and discussed scenarios for our activities in case of intensification of hostilities,” he said. “We now have about 450 pallets of various humanitarian supplies in stock, which we are delivering to hospitals … And, of course, we continue to look for partners and philanthropists to improve the delivery of humanitarian supplies directly to the affected population.”
While he remains optimistic that such preparations are purely precautionary, Chernohor underscored the feelings of unease created by the Kremlin’s volatile leadership.
Stirring hysteria among Ukrainians has thus far been a defining feature of Putin’s overall strategy, despite Moscow’s public lip service to de-escalation. In 2022 alone, more than 300 fake bomb threats of likely Russian origins have forced the closures and evacuations of schools across the country. “The goal,” Ukraine’s security service wrote, “is obvious—to create conditions for additional pressure on Ukraine, to sow anxiety and panic in society.”
After enduring eight years of psychological and hybrid warfare, Ukrainians are exhausted but resolute. “We want to live in a peaceful country. We want to go to work. We want to go to the park with our kids,” said Ladyka, the journalist preparing to fight in the event of a Russian attack. “We don’t want any war. We just want this to stop. ”
“Ukrainians oppose Russian tyranny and fight for their independence every day. Ukrainians did not want and do not want to fight but we have no choice—we are forced to defend [our] young democracy and [our] values and [our] families,” said Ovcharenko, the blogger who took up arms to defend against Russian aggression in 2014. “We will continue to fight.”
23. As the Olympics heat up, China clamps down on dissent
As the Olympics heat up, China clamps down on dissent
CNN · by Simone McCarthy, Selina Wang and Sandi Sidhu, CNN
Beijing (CNN)As Winter Olympians vie for gold in Beijing, global attention has turned to events in the extensive Olympic "bubble" -- a zone sealing off visiting athletes, media and participants from the rest of the host city to prevent the spread of Covid-19.
But in a different part of Beijing, prominent human rights activist Hu Jia is again living in another kind of bubble: what he says is a house arrest imposed by authorities who want him out of public view during the Games.
"They said Winter Olympics is a very important political event and no 'disharmonious voice' will be allowed -- like any criticism of the Winter Olympics, or any talk related to human rights," said Hu, who spoke to CNN during what he describes as a weeks-long restriction to his home.
"In China, people like me are called 'domestic hostile forces'... that's why they have to cut me off from the outside world," said Hu, who gained international prominence as a champion of human rights in the early 2000s and was a friend to late Nobel Peace Prize winner and dissident Liu Xiaobo.
Hu says he has been restricted to his residence, with the exception of trips to care for his ailing mother, since January 15. It's an escalation of the round-the-clock state surveillance Hu says he has been under for nearly two decades. It's also treatment he has become used to during sensitive political events in China. Hu said he was originally told to leave Beijing altogether and relocate to Guangdong during the Olympic period but an outbreak of Covid-19 prevented him from going.
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Human rights activist Hu Jia in Beijing in 2013.
But Hu is far from the only dissident facing restrictions in the months leading up the Winter Games.
William Nee, research and advocacy coordinator at Chinese Human Rights Defenders, a non-profit network supporting rights advocates in China, said before the Winter Games there had been an uptick in reports of state security wanting to know people's whereabouts, house arrests and the detention of high profile activists and lawyers.
"The Olympics has given China an opportunity to showcase its international clout and it doesn't want pesky activists disrupting that and talking about its human rights abuses," he said, adding that many prominent rights defenders are "surveilled by state security all the time" or subject to other measures of control.
Rights experts say that crackdowns on activists and speech -- which can range from closing social media accounts to house arrests, detentions or enforced disappearances -- are typical in the lead up to sensitive events in China, where the Communist Party keeps a tight lid on dissent.
"The point is to prevent any contact between the activists and, essentially, the outside world, which, during these events, tends to pay more attention to what's happening in China," said Maya Wang, a senior China researcher at the New York-based non-profit Human Rights Watch.
But controls on dissent have been getting tighter year-round, blurring the line between normal and sensitive periods, according to observers.
"The human rights environment in China has deteriorated pretty significantly in the last decade," Wang said.
Guards secure barriers after a bus arrives at a hotel that is part of the Olympics closed loop bubble.
A shadow over the Games
Concerns over China's human rights record have already cast a shadow over Beijing's Olympic Games, including a US-led diplomatic boycott over what Washington calls serious human rights abuses against Uyghur and other Muslim minorities in the country's far-western region of Xinjiang.
China has denied these charges and pushed back on international concerns about its human rights record, calling these "political posturing and manipulation" in the lead up to the Games.
Following a faxed request for comment on allegations that Hu Jia has been forcibly confined to his home during the Winter Olympics, and that other human rights activists have also been detained or monitored, China's Ministry of Public Security referred CNN to Beijing authorities. Multiple calls to the Beijing municipal government went unanswered.
Hu, who rose to prominence for his activism related to HIV/AIDS in rural China, says the house arrest began after he posted on Twitter -- a platform banned in China -- describing a ramp-up of restrictions and controls on activists in the lead up to the Beijing Games,. He also noted the circumstances of jailed or missing dissidents while using a Winter Olympics hashtag in Chinese.
Since then, security agents have visited him multiple times, Hu says, including once this week to instruct him not to discuss Olympic skier Eileen Gu. That was after Hu commented via Twitter on an article about the US-born athlete who is representing China at the Beijing Games.
Ai Weiwei: International Olympic Committee 'standing next to the authoritarians' 17:36
Hu says he expects this period of house arrest could last through the country's annual legislative gathering next month. He says he'll spend the time reading.
"It's so much better than my friends who are suffering in jail and prison. We are like (the difference between) heaven and hell, so I have nothing to complain about," Hu said in a recorded video dairy, where he is documenting this period of house arrest for CNN.
"There is some level of stress for sure, my mental health, and so on. After all, you always want to be able to walk out of your home freely and stand under the bright sky," he said in another entry.
But Hu is no stranger to harsher forms of confinement.
Just months before Beijing hosted its last Olympics in 2008, Hu was handed a three-and-a-half year prison term for "incitement to subvert state power" -- a sentence that activists at the time linked to his work calling international attention to human rights abuses in China ahead of the Games.
This time, Hu watched the Olympic opening ceremony from his elderly parents' home in Beijing -- the one place he says the security agents will allow him to visit and a privilege he says they have threatened to deny if he acts out. He also says if things escalate he could be imprisoned again. But nonetheless, Hu has a message.
"This might be the only Olympics in history that has drawn so much attention to its host country's human rights issues. This is a really good opportunity to explore and discover China's human rights issues, including Uyghurs, Tibetans, Hong Kongers, Taiwanese... and also citizens, human rights activists, and dissidents like us who are in mainland China now," said Hu.
"I hope the world will see this clearly and pay more attention to human rights issues...not just during the Winter Olympics...but also keep watching democracy, human rights, and the future of China," he said.
CNN · by Simone McCarthy, Selina Wang and Sandi Sidhu, CNN
24. Senators: CIA has secret program that collects American data
Senators: CIA has secret program that collects American data
AP · by NOMAAN MERCHANT · February 11, 2022
WASHINGTON (AP) — The CIA has a secret, undisclosed data repository that includes information collected about Americans, two Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee said Thursday. While neither the agency nor lawmakers would disclose specifics about the data, the senators alleged the CIA had long hidden details about the program from the public and Congress.
Sens. Ron Wyden of Oregon and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico sent a letter to top intelligence officials calling for more details about the program to be declassified. Large parts of the letter, which was sent in April 2021 and declassified Thursday, and documents released by the CIA were blacked out. Wyden and Heinrich said the program operated “outside the statutory framework that Congress and the public believe govern this collection.”
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There have long been concerns about what information the intelligence community collects domestically, driven in part by previous violations of Americans’ civil liberties. The CIA and National Security Agency have a foreign mission and are generally barred from investigating Americans or U.S. businesses. But the spy agencies’ sprawling collection of foreign communications often snares Americans’ messages and data incidentally.
Intelligence agencies are required to take steps to protect U.S. information, including redacting the names of any Americans from reports unless they are deemed relevant to an investigation. The process of removing redactions is known as “unmasking.”
“CIA recognizes and takes very seriously our obligation to respect the privacy and civil liberties of U.S. persons in the conduct of our vital national security mission,” Kristi Scott, the agency’s privacy and civil liberties officer, said in a statement. “CIA is committed to transparency consistent with our obligation to protect intelligence sources and methods.”
The CIA released a series of redacted recommendations about the program issued by an oversight panel known as the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. According to the document, a pop-up box warns CIA analysts using the program that seeking any information about U.S. citizens or others covered by privacy laws requires a foreign intelligence purpose.
“However, analysts are not required to memorialize the justification for their queries,” the board said.
Both senators have long pushed for more transparency from the intelligence agencies. Nearly a decade ago, a question Wyden posed to the nation’s spy chief presaged critical revelations about the NSA’s mass-surveillance programs.
In 2013, Wyden asked then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper if the NSA collected “any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans.” Clapper initially responded, “No.” He later said, “Not wittingly.”
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Former systems administrator Edward Snowden later that year revealed the NSA’s access to bulk data through U.S. internet companies and hundreds of millions of call records from telecommunications providers. Those revelations sparked worldwide controversy and new legislation in Congress.
Clapper would later apologize in a letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee, calling his response to Wyden “clearly erroneous.”
According to Wyden and Heinrich’s letter, the CIA’s bulk collection program operates outside of laws passed and reformed by Congress, but under the authority of Executive Order 12333, the document that broadly governs intelligence community activity and was first signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1981.
“It is critical that Congress not legislate without awareness of a ... CIA program, and that the American public not be misled into believe that the reforms in any reauthorization legislation fully cover the IC’s collection of their records,” the senators wrote in their letter. There was a redaction in the letter before “CIA program.”
Additional documents released by the CIA Thursday also revealed limited details about a program to collect financial data against the Islamic State. That program also has incidentally snared some records held by Americans.
Intelligence agencies are subject to guidelines on the handling and destruction of Americans’ data. Those guidelines and laws governing intelligence activity have evolved over time in response to previous revelations about domestic spying.
The FBI spied on the U.S. civil rights movement and secretly recorded the conversations of Dr. Martin Luther King. The CIA, in what was called Operation Chaos, investigated whether the movement opposing the Vietnam War had links to foreign countries.
“These reports raise serious questions about the kinds of information the CIA is vacuuming up in bulk and how the agency exploits that information to spy on Americans,” Patrick Toomey, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement. “The CIA conducts these sweeping surveillance activities without any court approval, and with few, if any, safeguards imposed by Congress.”
AP · by NOMAAN MERCHANT · February 11, 2022
25. U.S. intelligence report details 'indirect' Russian government support for Western neofascist groups
Excerpts:
The extremists did not endear themselves to their ostensible Russian government allies, either. The Russians looked at them as a “thorn in their side” and “sent them home,” said the former CIA official. Alternatively, Russian officials forbid some troublesome Russian extremist fighters from returning to Russia, forcing them to stay in the part of eastern Ukraine held by pro-Russia insurgents, according to a former senior CIA official.
By 2015, Russia had also started stifling some domestic neo-Nazi groups’ use of Russian social media sites, which made the Kremlin’s laissez-faire attitude toward foreign extremist groups operating on these same platforms particularly notable, recalled the first former CIA official.
By the time former President Donald Trump was sworn in, CIA officials were “really concerned” about the growing relationship between Russian extremists and their Western counterparts, according to the former senior agency official. The CIA declined to comment.
At the CIA, these connections were seen as “a sufficiently problematic new wrinkle that they were making the point of publishing on it at least a few times a year,” said the former official.
Given the larger issues around Russia and the Trump administration, he added, it “was a fraught time to relay that message.”
U.S. intelligence report details 'indirect' Russian government support for Western neofascist groups
A U.S. intelligence community assessment obtained by Yahoo News concluded that the Russian government is providing “indirect and passive support” to neofascist groups operating in the U.S. and elsewhere, but stops short of accusing the Kremlin of supplying financial or material assistance to Western extremist groups.
The Kremlin “probably tolerates some private Russian entities’ support” for U.S. and European white nationalist groups “because it aligns with Kremlin efforts to aggravate societal fissures in the West,” states the report.
A still from a propaganda video by an American white supremacist group Atomwaffen Division. (AWD via Soufan Center)
Russian neofascist groups have attempted to recruit and provide paramilitary training to North American and European extremists in order to “expand their reach into the West, increase membership, and raise money,” according to the unclassified July 2021 intelligence report.
The support of Western neofascists by Russian extremists “poses a potential threat to Western security by encouraging and enabling attacks on ethnic minorities and government facilities,” states the report, which is titled “Russian Federation Support of Racially and Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists.”
But the report, which was prepared by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence with input from the CIA and the FBI, also says the U.S. government lacks “indications of direct Russian government support” for foreign white nationalist groups.
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Russian state-backed online influence operations do, however, “amplify politically divisive issues” that likely help in “the radicalization and recruitment efforts worldwide" of white nationalist groups, the report states.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment.
Russian extremist groups are actively training foreign white nationalists, the report states. One Russian neofascist group, the Russian Imperial Movement, has overseen paramilitary instruction for European extremists at its Russia-based camps, and has tried to recruit Americans to train there, according to the report.
The State Department designated the Russian Imperial Movement as a terrorist group in April 2020. The organization “actively supplies paramilitary training to foreign nationals for possible future attacks in their respective home countries or on the battlefields of Ukraine,” according to a May 2021 Customs and Border Patrol bulletin obtained by Yahoo News.
Another Russian extremist group with foreign connections, the neo-Nazi Rusich Reconnaissance and Sabotage Group, sent members to fight in eastern Ukraine in 2014 and 2015, according to the intelligence community assessment.
Rusich recently hinted on social media about its plans to return to eastern Ukraine, according to the New America Foundation. Rusich is closely aligned with Russia’s paramilitary Wagner Group, according to New America.
An Instagram post showing members of the Russian extremist group Rusich Reconnaissance and Sabotage Group on a Russian tank, September 2021. (@rusichvpk/Instagram)
While the report describes the Russian government’s support for these extremist groups as “indirect and passive,” this is a “distinction without a difference,” said a former senior CIA official.
“When you look at the number of Russian neo-Nazis that are actively infiltrating, or looking to digitally infiltrate U.S. groups,” said the former official, “at some point, if it’s so pervasive, and the Russians aren’t doing anything to stop it, is that really materially different from the big stamp coming down from the sky and saying, ‘We approve?’”
Western fears about the growing links between domestic far-right extremists and their ideological allies in Eastern Europe aren’t limited to Russia. For years, the U.S. has tried to map connections between white supremacists in the United States and foreign groups.
Members of the Rusich Reconnaissance and Sabotage Group, a Russian far-right organization.(@rusichvpk/Instagram)
Now, with the looming threat of a Russian invasion of Ukraine, U.S. officials are scrambling to identify and track American white supremacists who might seek to travel to the region to fight on either side of the conflict there, according to three current U.S. law enforcement and intelligence officials.
“There’s real concern here that this is another Syria,” said a current senior law enforcement official, referring to how the Middle Eastern country’s civil war turned into a training ground for foreign extremists.
Over the past several years, foreign fighters have flocked to join both sides of the Ukraine conflict. Since 2014, over 17,000 fighters from more than 50 countries have traveled to Ukraine, including far-right extremists, according to a 2019 report by the Soufan Group.
Members of the Russian Imperial Movement, a nationalist group in Russia that supports the self-declared Donetsk People's Republic, at a training base in St. Petersburg in 2015. (Olga Maltseva/AFP via Getty Images)
Worries about Ukraine becoming a vortex for extremists have “been a long time coming,” said the senior law enforcement official. “Wherever there is conflict there are people who want to join in and be a hero — so now we have a conflict, and now we have a real problem.”
The Azov Movement, a Ukrainian extremist group, has enlisted American white supremacist fighters to travel to Ukraine “to receive training, indoctrination, and guidance in asymmetrical warfare,” according to a January 2020 CBP intelligence bulletin obtained by Yahoo News.
CBP did not return Yahoo News’ request for comment.
Leaders of two American white supremacist groups, the Rise Above Movement and the Atomwaffen Division, as well as other known or suspected American white supremacists traveled to Ukraine to train with the group, according to the bulletin.
With the easing of COVID-19-related travel restrictions, U.S. officials have also become increasingly concerned about the movements in and out of the U.S. by associates of the Russian Imperial Movement, according to the May 2021 CBP bulletin.
A white nationalist wearing a Rise Above Movement T-shirt attends a gun rights rally in Richmond, Va., in 2020. The Rise Above Movement is a white supremacist group based in Southern California. (Jim Urquhart)
The State Department’s designation of the Russian Imperial Movement as a terrorist group gives law enforcement more power to investigate Americans associated with the organization inside the United States. But since other Russian and Ukrainian far-right groups are not officially designated as terrorist organizations, this complicates tracking their suspected U.S.-based associates, according to the senior law enforcement official.
Meanwhile, the Kremlin has had its own clashes with Russian white nationalist groups, experts say. While the Kremlin has taken a passive stance toward Russian neofascists' outreach to North American or European extremists, it has sometimes forcefully suppressed domestic groups — including by imprisoning their leaders — if it believes they are becoming too influential at home or are ideologically unreliable, according to the intelligence report and former CIA officials.
The war in Ukraine caused a major fracture in the Russian white nationalist movement, say experts, with “pan-Slavist” Russian extremists denouncing the Kremlin’s actions during Russia’s initial 2014 incursion, and facing the Kremlin’s wrath thereafter. The Russian intelligence services “absolutely crushed the pan-Slavist Nazis” during this period, said a former CIA official.
Other Russian extremists got the message, or saw the invasion of Ukraine in a different light. Some Russian white nationalists began funneling money to help send volunteers to fight alongside pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine, said a second former CIA official.
But extremist paramilitaries quickly found themselves in a morass in Ukraine, according to the former official. “These guys were in no shape or form to go up against a military,” said the former official.
Pro-Russian forces dubbed the "military forces of the autonomous republic of Crimea" attend their swearing-in ceremony in Simferopol, March 10, 2014. (Filippo Montefoprte/AFP via Getty Images)
The extremists did not endear themselves to their ostensible Russian government allies, either. The Russians looked at them as a “thorn in their side” and “sent them home,” said the former CIA official. Alternatively, Russian officials forbid some troublesome Russian extremist fighters from returning to Russia, forcing them to stay in the part of eastern Ukraine held by pro-Russia insurgents, according to a former senior CIA official.
By 2015, Russia had also started stifling some domestic neo-Nazi groups’ use of Russian social media sites, which made the Kremlin’s laissez-faire attitude toward foreign extremist groups operating on these same platforms particularly notable, recalled the first former CIA official.
By the time former President Donald Trump was sworn in, CIA officials were “really concerned” about the growing relationship between Russian extremists and their Western counterparts, according to the former senior agency official. The CIA declined to comment.
At the CIA, these connections were seen as “a sufficiently problematic new wrinkle that they were making the point of publishing on it at least a few times a year,” said the former official.
Given the larger issues around Russia and the Trump administration, he added, it “was a fraught time to relay that message.”
26. How Far-Right Terrorists Choose Their Enemies
Excerpts:
As a practical matter, the differing target selection may also impact how we should react to attacks in the immediate aftermath. After the horror at Christchurch, New Zealanders rallied around the Muslim community. “Racism exists, but it is not welcome here. An assault on the freedom of any one of us who practices their faith or religion is not welcome here,” New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern proclaimed. But near-enemy violence often slithers along political divides, as evidenced painfully by the inability of the United States to rally as one around the police officer killed and the more than 100 officers injured during and after January 6. The latter format might require more nuanced reactions, appealing less to national values than to moral sensibility.
The United States and its allies have spent the better part of the past two decades focusing almost exclusively on the threat posed by jihadi groups, even as far-right extremism metastasized within its midst. As a result, there has been a steep learning curve in understanding the expanse of the far-right extremist movement and the important ideological differences within its various strands. Furthermore, looking at the threat through the lens of the “near enemy” and “far enemy” paradigm offers important insight into the far-right’s target selection and operational tempo, assisting counterterrorism forces’ allocation of resources and prioritization of defensive measures.
How Far-Right Terrorists Choose Their Enemies
Debates over which targets to prioritize aren’t exclusive to jihadi groups.
By Jacob Ware, the research associate for counterterrorism at the Council on Foreign Relations and an adjunct assistant professor at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, and Colin P. Clarke, the director of policy and research at the Soufan Group and a senior research fellow at the Soufan Center.
Terrorist groups’ internal communications frequently reveal infighting over a range of issues, from how to allocate resources to disagreements about personnel and finances. One area where terrorists commonly diverge is target selection, an issue that plagues groups across the ideological spectrum.
Salafi-jihadi groups have long debated the most prudent way to achieve their goals of expelling “imperialist” Western powers such as the United States and Israel from the Middle East and reestablishing the lost caliphate. This debate has traditionally broken down according to a “near enemy” versus “far enemy” paradigm.
The concept was originally laid out by the Islamist theorist Mohammed Abd al-Salam Faraj, who sought to convince fellow jihadis, including fellow Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri, to prioritize overthrowing the despotic Arab regimes that ruled their everyday lives—whom Faraj labeled the “near enemy”—before trying to take on the “far enemy” of “imperialist” powers such as the United States and Israel. Faraj argued that these (usually pro-Western) Arab rulers had allowed “infidels” to intervene in local affairs, facilitating foreign powers’ manipulative machinations in Middle Eastern culture and politics. Toppling these leaders and replacing them with true Muslim rulers was therefore key to ending imperialism.
Terrorist groups’ internal communications frequently reveal infighting over a range of issues, from how to allocate resources to disagreements about personnel and finances. One area where terrorists commonly diverge is target selection, an issue that plagues groups across the ideological spectrum.
Salafi-jihadi groups have long debated the most prudent way to achieve their goals of expelling “imperialist” Western powers such as the United States and Israel from the Middle East and reestablishing the lost caliphate. This debate has traditionally broken down according to a “near enemy” versus “far enemy” paradigm.
The concept was originally laid out by the Islamist theorist Mohammed Abd al-Salam Faraj, who sought to convince fellow jihadis, including fellow Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri, to prioritize overthrowing the despotic Arab regimes that ruled their everyday lives—whom Faraj labeled the “near enemy”—before trying to take on the “far enemy” of “imperialist” powers such as the United States and Israel. Faraj argued that these (usually pro-Western) Arab rulers had allowed “infidels” to intervene in local affairs, facilitating foreign powers’ manipulative machinations in Middle Eastern culture and politics. Toppling these leaders and replacing them with true Muslim rulers was therefore key to ending imperialism.
Al Qaeda’s leader Osama bin Laden would later flip the emphasis, arguing instead that the “far enemy” was the real source of strife in the Arab and Islamic world, directly responsible for a cultural, religious, and economic crusade against his people. Bin Laden, who was particularly angered by the U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia, believed it was futile to try to unseat local dictators while they enjoyed the backing of powerful Western countries. He therefore countered that jihadis should prioritize attacking the United States, Europe, and Israel to convince them to withdraw that support. Once they did, the local regimes, bereft of grassroots support, would be much easier to overthrow.
This wasn’t just a theoretical debate, but one with very real—and very bloody—consequences. Faraj’s view led him to play an instrumental role in the 1981 assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, for which Faraj was executed the following year. And, as the world now knows all too well, bin Laden’s preference for attacking the far enemy saw him launch devastating attacks on U.S. embassies in two African capitals in 1998, on USS Cole in the Gulf of Aden in 2000, and on New York City and Washington on Sept. 11, 2001.
But the near enemy and far enemy paradigm is not exclusive to jihadi groups. On the contrary, far-right terrorists and extremists have also begun to think along similar lines. As occurred within jihadi circles, the debate between members of the far right over which enemy, near or far, should be considered the more serious threat is dividing extremist ideologues and leading to disputes over target selection, tactics, and strategy. And identifying which of the movement’s factions are more likely to attack a given site might help counterterrorism professionals interdict the next plot or at least help likely targets erect defenses.
The concept of the “Great Replacement”—the idea that native-born white people in the United States and Europe are being deliberately replaced by nonwhite immigrants—has been the driving ideological force motivating most modern acts of far-right violence. Like the similar “white genocide” theory, this idea is notable because it explicitly defines both an internal and external enemy of those who “invade” as well as those allegedly orchestrating the “invasion.” Regardless of physical location, then, the far enemy for both jihadis and far-right extremists is the perceived invader, and the near enemy is anyone allowing or facilitating the invasion.
In many ways, this concept is similar to the message that bin Laden and al Qaeda’s chief propagandists pushed to their followers: The West is at war with Islam and it is your duty to fight back against an existential threat. In other words, terrorism is the only way to save your people (for bin Laden, this meant Muslims worldwide, or the ummah, and for far-right extremists, it’s the white race) from extinction. Crucially, in both cases, the near and far distinction is not geographic. Rather, it is symbolic, referring not to the extremist’s proximity to their perceived oppressor but to that oppressor’s role in the cultural, religious, economic, or demographic “replacement” of the extremist’s clan.
The Great Replacement has been referenced by some of the most notorious far-right terrorists of recent years, including Anders Breivik, Brenton Tarrant, and Patrick Crusius—who, respectively, attacked a government building and youth camp in Norway, a mosque in New Zealand, and a Walmart in Texas—among others. The manifestos these extremists left build upon and reference one another, seeking to advance these ideas and socialize them throughout the movement. Yet their target selection differs, a testament to how far-right terrorists, like their jihadi counterparts, develop varying perceptions of the foremost enemy of their cause.
Maybe the most haunting volley in the present wave of far-right terrorism afflicting the Western world occurred in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019. The gunman, a white supremacist named Brenton Tarrant, entered two mosques and opened fire, murdering 51 innocent worshippers, and livestreaming the first attack on Facebook. Tarrant’s manifesto, itself titled the “Great Replacement,” was a testament to far-enemy plotting: “We are experiencing an invasion on a level never seen before in history,” he declared, a blithe attempt to justify his mass murder.
Far-enemy targeting focuses violence against real or perceived immigrants, including Muslims, Asians, and Hispanics but also, perhaps counterintuitively, African Americans. Despite their centuries-long presence in the United States and the West, African Americans are still usually depicted by white supremacists as cultural and social invaders. Dylann Roof, who in 2015 murdered nine churchgoers at the Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina, reportedly told his victims during the rampage, “I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.” Similar language, referencing an ethnic or racial replacement, is often used against immigrant communities.
Attacks targeting the far-enemy are often the most obviously “far-right” in that they very clearly target an ethnic or religious “other.” In fact, far-enemy terrorists are often so blindly hateful to perceived outsiders that they sometimes fail to correctly identify their victims. In one attack in a bar in Olathe, Kansas, in 2017, an Indian immigrant was killed by an attacker who thought he was targeting Iranians. Of course, the order he gave his victims—“get out of my country”—was not specific to their race or national origin: Being nonwhite was sufficient to merit their death. Far-enemy attacks, thus, fit neatly into the symbolic hero image that white supremacists love to convey of white soldiers taking up arms against the horde of invaders, the “barbarians at the gates.”
Read More
Jan. 6 was a classic example of propaganda by the deed—a revolutionary approach favored by everyone from 19th-century anarchists to Osama bin Laden.
That said, despite the no doubt understandable perception that far-right terrorism primarily targets ethnic and religious minorities, the deadliest far-right incidents over the past 30 years have largely targeted racial compatriots, with near-enemy targeting often transcending “Great Replacement” thinking to involve a broader defense against a perceived assault on the rights of the attacker.
Timothy McVeigh’s assault on Oklahoma City in 1995 was aimed at federal law enforcement agencies who maintained a presence in the Alfred Murrah Federal Building. That bombing remains the deadliest modern far-right terrorist attack in the West, killing 168 people and injuring nearly 700 more. In 2011, Norwegian neo-Nazi Anders Breivik killed 77 at twin attacks on Oslo’s government quarter and a summer camp hosted by the youth wing of the Norwegian Labour Party. And the 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol targeted politicians of both parties, perhaps most notably Republican Vice President Mike Pence, who narrowly escaped a crowd baying for his hanging.
Breivik’s near-enemy plotting was actually so detailed that he meticulously outlined his categorization in his manifesto: enemy categories A, B, and C, ranging from political and media leaders to more peripheral figures in the political space but, crucially, all were domestic. Moreover, Breivik implored his followers not to directly attack the very immigrant communities he felt were eradicating the European project: “We will never have a chance at overthrowing the cultural Marxist if we waste our energy and efforts on fighting Muslims.” Ironically, his decree was ignored by his foremost disciple, Brenton Tarrant, despite the latter writing in his own manifesto that he “only really took true inspiration from Knight Justiciar Breivik.”
There is a significant nonracial element to near-enemy targeting, particularly when aimed at the government. In those cases, the government is seen as facilitating a broader assault on the assailant’s most cherished “rights”—such as gun rights, religion, or in the case of January 6, the reelection of Donald Trump. The near-enemy terrorist, then, will select one of a range of possible targets. Politicians are often targeted for their controversial policies. Jews similarly find themselves in the crosshairs because of the myriad far-right conspiracies obsessing over their alleged control of society. Or extremists might focus their vitriol against whites perceived as indifferent or complacent, particularly what they see as “race traitors” in interracial relationships. Others, including newer neo-Nazi collaboratives like the Atomwaffen Division and the Base, have displayed a willingness to target infrastructure in their aim to “accelerate” the destabilization of society.
Near-enemy terrorists, though, are still often motivated by “Great Replacement” thinking. There is perhaps no clearer example than Robert Bowers, who killed 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018. Bowers targeted a synagogue because he felt they were participating in the import of so-called “migrant caravans” from Latin America. Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society “likes to bring invaders in that kill our people,” Bowers wrote on the far-right social media site Gab. “I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.” Such self-aggrandizing messages hint at his image of himself as a martyr for a greater cause.
The Pittsburgh case illustrates that the lines between the two categories are fluid: The ideology, as well as its underlying grievances, transcend both groupings, and targeting decisions are usually very personal. The near enemy of the far right, then, is the same as that of Salafi-jihadis: the local regimes and political movements that allow for, if not deliberately encourage, the infiltration of the “invader”—in this case, usually immigrants—or the erosion of the ultra-conservative extremist’s rights or values. The framing, in other words, is the same, differentiating between local near enemies who facilitate the cultural damage wreaked by an outside force, in this case represented by the invading far enemy.
Or, as one member of the now largely defunct Atomwaffen Division stated, “The Jews were the virus, the people of color and the homosexuals, they were the symptoms.” Both enemies are seen as evil and the question for terrorists is not which enemy should live and which should die—both must eventually be eliminated—but rather sequencing, thus, which enemy should be targeted first.
As an academic exercise, comparing the “near enemy” and “far enemy” paradigm across ideologies is fascinating. But from a practical sense, what does it actually mean for law enforcement and intelligence services? Can it help inform the way counterterrorism practitioners and policymakers approach this issue?
When terrorist groups differ on target selection, it can lead to a broader schism. Again, al Qaeda is instructive in this regard. In the mid-2000s, a fissure emerged between al Qaeda leadership in Pakistan and al Qaeda in Iraq, where its branch was led at the time by Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. While bin Laden and other senior leaders wanted to continue prioritizing attacks on the West, Zarqawi was primarily focused on the near enemy, working to exploit sectarianism in Iraq, highlighting differences between Sunni Arabs and the predominantly Shiite leadership in Baghdad. The differing target priorities were an important factor contributing to the crisis within jihadism and the subsequent emergence of the Islamic State just a few years later.
On the far right, differences exist less between groups and more between factions, with different categories attacking different targets. An anti-government extremist would be far more likely to attack the near enemy of federal overlords responsible for apparently repressive and tyrannical policies limiting gun rights and civil liberties. Neo-Nazis, too, would seemingly prioritize the elimination of near enemies in their case the all-seeing Jewish political and economic class.
But racists, xenophobes, and neo-Confederates, motivated more by ethnic grievances than any perceived political slight, may prefer the far enemy, delivering a more tangible blow to those they feel threaten their privileged position as whites. Since the far-right is more decentralized, the differences in targeting might have a less detrimental impact, as different nodes in the broader network are accustomed to functioning independently of one another, a phenomenon that holds true at both the tactical and strategic levels.
As a practical matter, the differing target selection may also impact how we should react to attacks in the immediate aftermath. After the horror at Christchurch, New Zealanders rallied around the Muslim community. “Racism exists, but it is not welcome here. An assault on the freedom of any one of us who practices their faith or religion is not welcome here,” New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern proclaimed. But near-enemy violence often slithers along political divides, as evidenced painfully by the inability of the United States to rally as one around the police officer killed and the more than 100 officers injured during and after January 6. The latter format might require more nuanced reactions, appealing less to national values than to moral sensibility.
The United States and its allies have spent the better part of the past two decades focusing almost exclusively on the threat posed by jihadi groups, even as far-right extremism metastasized within its midst. As a result, there has been a steep learning curve in understanding the expanse of the far-right extremist movement and the important ideological differences within its various strands. Furthermore, looking at the threat through the lens of the “near enemy” and “far enemy” paradigm offers important insight into the far-right’s target selection and operational tempo, assisting counterterrorism forces’ allocation of resources and prioritization of defensive measures.
27. Congress Proposes $500 Million for Negative News Coverage of China
There are a lot of researchers, think tanks, adn journalists doing this as a matter of course.
Here is my contribution:
China seeks to export its authoritarian political system around the world in order to dominate regions, co-opt or coerce international organizations, create economic conditions favorable to China alone, and displace democratic institutions.
Considerations for China’s OBOR
(AKA Belt and Road Initiative (BRI))
• What is the resistance potential against OBOR?
• Is it supportable and exploitable?
• How to develop a supporting campaign plan to support the new US Strategic Approach to China;
• Promoting American Prosperity
• Advancing American Influence
• Preserving Peace Through Strength.
• How to Support the GEC?
• Information and Influence Activities
• How to Support State?
• Blue Dot Network
• Economic Prosperity Network
• Is there a role for the 2 SOF “trinities?”
• Irregular Warfare, Unconventional Warfare, Support to Political Warfare
• The Comparative advantage of SOF: Governance, Influence, Support to indigenous forces and populations
Congress Proposes $500 Million for Negative News Coverage of China
The effort to counter China’s ‘malign influence’ would fund negative coverage of China’s Belt and Road Initiative—while also beefing up the U.S.’s international lending.
×Qingdao City/news aktuell via AP Images
The Second Belt and Road Energy Ministerial Conference under way at Qingdao International Convention Center, October 18, 2021
A tech and manufacturing bill currently moving through Congress allocates $500 million for media outlets to produce journalism for overseas audiences that is critical of China.
Meant to “combat Chinese disinformation,” the bill would direct funding to the U.S. Agency for Global Media, a U.S.-run foreign media service, as well as local outlets and programs to train foreign journalists.
The America COMPETES Act, just passed by the House, is an industrial policy plan for semiconductor production and supply chain resiliency. It sets aside technology investment funds for everything from high-level research to high school computer science.
If a domestic manufacturing bill seems like the wrong setting for spending on foreign news dispatches, sponsors say it’s a natural fit, since the need to stimulate American production is a matter of competition with Beijing. The sales pitch for reviving global competitiveness has been vivid: The country’s use of forced labor in Xinjiang camps, Nancy Pelosi said last week in a speech on the bill, “hurts American workers who have to compete with slave labor.”
The House version of the legislation, which passed last week, is a companion to the Senate’s more hawkish bill on China competition, USICA, which passed in June of last year. The plan is to merge both bills through a conference committee in the coming weeks.
The bills have titles penned by the Foreign Affairs Committees of each chamber. Both include a section named “Supporting independent media and countering disinformation.”
While both bills stipulate that the U.S.-funded media coverage should be “independent,” that mandate could be at odds with other requirements in the legislation. There is, at the very least, an appearance of conflict. For example, the Senate bill aims to crowd out Chinese investment in developing countries, and also encourages criticism of China’s projects in those markets.
Critics of escalating tensions with Beijing expressed concerns over the push for anti-China coverage, saying it could potentially undermine the credibility of journalists involved in the reporting.
“We welcome support for journalism,” Tobita Chow, the director of Justice Is Global, a group that advocates for a more equitable world economy, told the Prospect. “But if the government is setting out ahead of time in legislation what the conclusion and the point of coverage is going to be, that doesn’t really qualify as genuine journalism.”
Editorially Independent State-Funded News
The Senate bill aims to produce more anti-China media for regions where it says the Chinese Communist Party and other rivals are promoting “manipulated media markets.” It notes that the sponsored news will be “independent.”
Governments have long funded (relatively) impartial programming, from PBS’s educational shows for children to the titanic British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). But the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), which would receive the majority of the media support in this bill package, has a troubled legacy.
A federally funded government agency, USAGM oversees outlets including Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia (RFA), and the Office of Cuba Broadcasting (OCB). The outlets have sometimes blurred the line between objective news coverage and pro-American propaganda—a distinction that all but dissolved in the Trump years.
After the OCB came under fire for airing a 2018 segment calling the philanthropist George Soros “a nonbelieving Jew of flexible morals,” it conducted an internal review that offers a candid look at U.S.-run foreign media’s mission.
“A primordial rule of successful political messaging and modern marketing is that to influence people, you must usually first establish empathy with them,” the report explains. “OCB’s broadcasts and postings do that far too little. They seek instead to activate overt opposition and hostility to the entirety of the Cuban Revolution.” Instead, the report recommends a subtler approach that could more effectively sway Cuban public opinion.
The Trump administration put a registered lobbyist for Taiwan in control of Radio Free Asia, drawing criticism from journalists who said the outlet’s credibility was tarnished. And staffers at Voice of America wrote in a letter that orders to broadcast a speech by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo were an attempt to “stage a propaganda event.”
Progressive critics said that media funded as part of strategic rivalry with a peer competitor can lose its objectivity, or at least the appearance of objectivity.
U.S.-run broadcast networks have been responsive to changing political currents as recently as last December, when Voice of America expanded coverage in the area and named its network’s first-ever Eastern Europe chief, citing rising tensions with Russia and “the impact of Russia’s and China’s influence throughout the region.”
In light of that history, anti-war activists have been wary of expansions to U.S.-run news networks. While they were careful not to equate reporting by state-funded media in the United States, where robust free-speech laws protect journalists, to heavily censored state media in China, several progressive critics said that media funded as part of strategic rivalry with a peer competitor can lose its objectivity, or at least the appearance of objectivity.
“When the United States funds ‘independent’ media to report critically on China, very serious guardrails must be adhered to so that the U.S. government doesn’t simply appear to be pushing its own form of propaganda and to protect the safety and credibility of reporters who cover China with a critical lens,” one congressional progressive staffer said. “Otherwise, this funding is just an exercise in crude soft-power projection, with many sources at risk of being much more easily dismissed or repressed as pawns of a U.S. geopolitical strategy.”
The staffer added that progressive legislators would push for outlets and journalists receiving U.S. funding or training to disclose that relationship transparently in their reporting.
“The Chinese state’s own attempts to manipulate public opinion overseas tend to backfire,” Jake Werner, a researcher on China at Boston University and co-founder of Justice Is Global, told the Prospect. Although the funding could produce some good journalism, he said, “it would also tend to sow doubt and hostility toward journalists doing critical reporting on China’s activities among key audiences like overseas Chinese.”
Responding to a request for comment, Rohit Mahajan, a spokesperson for Radio Free Asia, referred the Prospect to RFA’s mission statement.
“Radio Free Asia’s journalists do not engage in propaganda,” Mahajan added. “RFA brings fact-based, independent news to millions living in places where authoritarians and elites do everything in their power to silence a free press and free speech.”
Amendment to Limit Production of Propaganda
In the 1970s, following reports that Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty were backed with CIA funds, Arkansas Sen. J. William Fulbright, a pre-eminent critic of American foreign policy, argued that the “radios … [should] take their rightful place in the graveyard of Cold War relics.” While most of Fulbright’s opposition to U.S.-run broadcasting was unsuccessful, he led a reform effort that restricted the distribution of overseas propaganda material to Americans.
Rep. Edward Zorinsky (D-NE) later extended that reform, arguing that refraining from propagandizing the American people “distinguishes us, as a free society, from the Soviet Union where domestic propaganda is a principal government activity.”
That prohibition, which extended to Radio Free Asia and other USAGM networks, was in place until 2012. An amendment in that year’s defense authorization bill repealed the ban on disseminating propaganda to domestic audiences. A spokesperson for the USAGM (then called the Broadcasting Board of Governors) said at the time that repealing the ban would increase transparency and help the agency reach diaspora groups living in America, such as Somali expats in Minnesota.
Now, progressives concerned about the new enthusiasm for producing reporting critical of competitors are hoping to limit the likelihood that new funding produces propaganda. An amendment to the House bill, introduced by Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-TX), would prohibit the use of any funds “for publicity or propaganda purposes not authorized by the Congress.”
“The initial goal was to try to revive that long-standing prohibition on propagandizing people in the United States,” Erik Sperling, the executive director of Just Foreign Policy, told the Prospect. Sperling’s group worked on developing the Escobar amendment.
When reached for comment, Sperling said he was surprised to see that language specifying “United States” had been cut from the amendment after he had last seen it. While his organization had only planned to push for the more modest request not to propagandize Americans, he welcomed a more general mandate not to distribute propaganda overseas.
The amendment passed among two dozen Congressional Progressive Caucus amendments to the House legislation. Since a ban on propaganda could be at odds with more hawkish coverage of China, it remains to be seen how it will be reconciled with the bill’s broader priorities. A progressive staffer said it is intended as a “guardrail.”
China Criticism Aimed at Arenas Where U.S. Seeks to Compete
Funding critical news coverage in a bill package that heightens competition with the subjects of that coverage could call into doubt the objectivity of U.S.-run media.
One example is coverage of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The Senate bill encourages criticism of the BRI, which it is directly seeking to compete with.
China in recent years has erected ports, bridges, and other public works in countries from Pakistan to Peru. The result is an imperial-scale influence campaign, targeted at developing countries and geostrategic choke points, that has been compared to the Marshall Plan, America’s spending to rebuild Western Europe and contain the Soviet Union after World War II.
Since taking office, President Biden has talked about wresting back turf from China with rival investments, particularly in nearby Latin America and the Caribbean. USICA, the Senate bill, would raise U.S. spending through the Inter-American Development Bank, and introduce “conditionality measures” to block partner countries from borrowing simultaneously from China.
One subtitle of USICA creates a “Countering Chinese Influence Fund” totaling $1.5 billion over a five-year period, with more than a third of funds aimed at media outlets.
The push to counter China, the subtitle explains, should “raise awareness of and increase transparency regarding the negative impact of activities related to the Belt and Road Initiative.” It should also urge “support for market-based alternatives in key economic sectors, such as digital economy, energy, and infrastructure.”
The House and Senate Foreign Affairs Committees did not respond to questions from the Prospect, including on how bill sponsors define “disinformation” and “misinformation.” The terms are not defined in either bill.
28. Facebook Has a Superuser-Supremacy Problem
Interesting analysis and data. If this is accurate and these are relatively small numbers it would seem like Facebook should be capable of monitoring and policing their platform.
Excerpts:
Allowing a small set of people who behave horribly to dominate the platform is Facebook’s choice, not an inevitability. If each of Facebook’s 15,000 U.S. moderators aggressively reviewed several dozen of the most active users and permanently removed those guilty of repeated violations, abuse on Facebook would drop drastically within days. But so would overall user engagement.
Perhaps this is why we found that Facebook rarely takes action, even against the worst offenders. Of the 150 accounts with clear abusive behavior in our sample, only seven were suspended a year later. Facebook may publicly condemn users who post hate, spread misinformation, and hunger for violence. In private, though, hundreds of thousands of repeat offenders still rank among the most important people on Facebook.
Facebook Has a Superuser-Supremacy Problem
Most public activity on the platform comes from a tiny, hyperactive group of abusive users. Facebook relies on them to decide what everyone sees.
The Atlantic · by Matthew Hindman, Nathaniel Lubin, Trevor Davis · February 10, 2022
If you want to understand why Facebook too often is a cesspool of hate and disinformation, a good place to start is with users such as John, Michelle, and Calvin.
John, a caps-lock devotee from upstate New York, calls House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “PIGLOSI,” uses the term negro, and says that the right response to Democrats with whom they disagree is to “SHOOT all of them.” Michelle rails against the “plandemic.” Calvin uses gay as a slur and declares that Black neighborhoods are always “SHITHOLES.” You’ve almost certainly encountered people like these on the internet. What you may not realize, though, is just how powerful they are.
For more than a year, we’ve been analyzing a massive new data set that we designed to study public behavior on the 500 U.S. Facebook pages that get the most engagement from users. Our research, part of which will be submitted for peer review later this year, aims to better understand the people who spread hate and misinformation on Facebook. We hoped to learn how they use the platform and, crucially, how Facebook responds. Based on prior reporting, we expected it would be ugly. What we found was much worse.
The most alarming aspect of our findings is that people like John, Michelle, and Calvin aren’t merely fringe trolls, or a distraction from what really matters on the platform. They are part of an elite, previously unreported class of users that produce more likes, shares, reactions, comments, and posts than 99 percent of Facebook users in America.
They’re superusers. And because Facebook’s algorithm rewards engagement, these superusers have enormous influence over which posts are seen first in other users’ feeds, and which are never seen at all. Even more shocking is just how nasty most of these hyper-influential users are. The most abusive people on Facebook, it turns out, are given the most power to shape what Facebook is.
Facebook activity is far more concentrated than most realize. The company likes to emphasize the breadth of its platform: nearly 2.9 billion monthly active users, visiting millions of public pages and groups. This is misleading. Our analysis shows that public activity is focused on a far narrower set of pages and groups, frequented by a much thinner slice of users.
Top pages such as those of Ben Shapiro, Fox News, and Occupy Democrats generated tens of millions of interactions a month in our data, while all U.S. pages ranked 300 or lower in terms of engagement received less than 1 million interactions each. (The pages with the most engagement included examples from the far right and the far left, but right-wing pages were dominant among the top-ranked overtly political pages.) This winners-take-all pattern mirrors that seen in many other arenas, such as the dominance of a few best-selling books or the way a few dozen huge blue-chip firms dominate the total market capitalization of the S&P 500. On Facebook, though, the concentration of attention on a few ultra-popular pages has not been widely known.
We analyzed two months of public activity from the 500 U.S.-run pages with the highest average engagement in the summer of 2020. The top pages lean toward politics, but the list includes pages on a broad mix of other subjects too: animals, daily motivation, Christian devotional content, cooking and crafts, and of course news, sports, and entertainment. User engagement fell off so steeply across the top 500, and in such a statistically regular fashion, that we estimate these 500 pages accounted for about half of the public U.S. page engagement on the platform. (We conducted our research with a grant from the nonprofit Hopewell Fund, which is part of a network of organizations that distribute anonymous donations to progressive causes. Officials at Hopewell were not involved in any way in our research, or in assessing or approving our conclusions. The grant we received is not attached to any political cause but is instead part of a program focused on supporting researchers studying misinformation and accountability on the social web.)
Public groups differ from pages in several ways. Pages usually represent organizations or public figures, and only administrators are able to post content on them, while groups are like old-school internet forums where any user can post. Groups thus tend to have a much higher volume of posts, more comments, and fewer likes and shares—but they also follow a winners-take-all pattern, albeit a less extreme one.
Because the number of group posts is so much larger, we analyzed groups more intensely over two weeks within that same two-month time frame in 2020, looking at tens of millions of the highest-interaction posts from more than 41,000 of the highest-membership U.S. public groups.
Overall, we observed 52 million users active on these U.S. pages and public groups, less than a quarter of Facebook’s claimed user base in the country. Among this publicly active minority of users, the top 1 percent of accounts were responsible for 35 percent of all observed interactions; the top 3 percent were responsible for 52 percent. Many users, it seems, rarely, if ever, interact with public groups or pages.
As skewed as those numbers are, they still underestimate the dominance of superusers. Facebook users follow a consistent ladder of engagement. Low-public-activity users overwhelmingly do just one thing: They like a post or two on one of the most popular pages. As activity increases, users perform more types of public engagement—adding shares, reactions, and then comments—and spread out beyond the most popular pages and groups. As we look at smaller and smaller pages and groups, then, we find that more and more of their engagement comes from the most avid users. Complete coverage of the smaller pages and tiniest groups we miss would thus paint an even starker picture of superuser supremacy.
The dominance of superusers has huge implications beyond just our initial concern with abusive users. Perhaps the most important revelations that came from the former Facebook data engineer Frances Haugen’s trove of internal documents concerned the inner workings of Facebook’s key algorithm, called “Meaningful Social Interaction,” or MSI. Facebook introduced MSI in 2018, as it was confronting declining engagement across its platform, and Zuckerberg hailed the change as a way to help “connect with people we care about.” Facebook reportedly tied employees’ bonuses to the measure.
The basics of MSI are simple: It ranks posts by assigning points for different public interactions. Posts with a lot of MSI tend to end up at the top of users’ news feeds—and posts with little are, usually, never seen at all. According to The Wall Street Journal, when MSI was first rolled out on the platform, a “like” was worth one point; reactions and re-shares were worth five points; “nonsignificant” comments were worth 15 points; and “significant” comments or messages were worth 30.
A metric like MSI, which gives more weight to less frequent behaviors such as comments, confers influence on an even smaller set of users. Using the values referenced by The Wall Street Journal and drawing from Haugen’s documents, we estimate that the top 1 percent of publicly visible users would have produced about 45 percent of MSI on the pages and groups we observed, plus or minus a couple percent depending on what counts as a “significant” comment. Mark Zuckerberg initially killed changes to the News Feed proposed by Facebook’s integrity team, according to internal messages characterizing his reasoning, because he was worried about lower MSI. Because activity is so concentrated, though, this effectively let hyperactive users veto the very policies that would have reined in their own abuse.
Our data suggests that a majority of MSI on top U.S. pages came from about 700,000 users out of the more than 230 million users that Facebook claims to have in America. Facebook declined to answer our questions for this article, and instead provided this statement: “While we’re not able to comment on research we haven’t seen, the small parts that have been shared with us are inaccurate and seem to fundamentally misunderstand how News Feed works. Ranking is optimized for what we predict each person wants to see, not what the most active users do.”
Facebook’s comments aside, it is well documented that the company has long used friends’ and general users’ activity as the key predictor of “what users want to see,” and that MSI in particular has been Zuckerberg’s “north star.” Various reporting shows how Facebook has repeatedly tweaked the weights of different MSI components, such as reaction emoji. Initially five points, they were dropped to four, then one and a half, then likes and loves were boosted to two while the angry emoji’s weight was dropped to zero. As The Atlantic first reported last year, internal documents show that Facebook engineers say they found that reducing the weight of “angry” translated to a substantial reduction in hate speech and misinformation. Facebook says it made that change permanent in the fall of 2020. An internal email from January 2020 says that Facebook was rolling out a change that would reduce the influence strangers had on the MSI metric.
Our research shows something different: None of this tweaking changes the big picture. The users who produce the most public reactions also produce the most likes, shares, and comments—so re-weighting just reshuffles slightly which of the most active users matter more. Now that we can see that harmful behaviors come mostly from superusers, it’s very clear: So long as adding up different types of engagement remains a key ingredient in Facebook’s recommendation system, it amplifies the choices of the same ultra-narrow, largely hateful slice of users.
So who are these people? To answer that question, we looked at a random sample of 30,000 users, out of the more than 52 million users we observed participating on these pages and public groups. We focused on the most active 300 by total interactions, those in the top percentile in their total likes, shares, reactions, comments, and group posts. Our review of these accounts, based on their public profile information and pictures, shows that these top users skew white, older, and—especially among abusive users—male. Under-30 users are largely absent.
Because the top 300 were all heavy users, three-quarters of them left at least 20 public comments over our two-month period, and some left thousands. We read as many of their comments as we could, more than 80,000 total.
Of the 219 accounts with at least 25 public comments, 68 percent spread misinformation, reposted in spammy ways, published comments that were racist or sexist or anti-Semitic or anti-gay, wished violence on their perceived enemies, or, in most cases, several of the above. Even with a 6 percent margin of error, it is clear that a supermajority of the most active users are toxic.
Top users pushed a dizzying and contradictory flood of misinformation. Many asserted that COVID does not exist, that the pandemic is a form of planned mass murder, or that it is an elaborate plot to microchip the population through “the killer vaccination program” of Bill Gates. Over and over, these users declared that vaccines kill, that masks make you sick, and that hydroxychloroquine and zinc fix everything. The misinformation we encountered wasn’t all about COVID-19—lies about mass voter fraud appeared in more than 1,000 comments.
Racist, sexist, anti-Semitic, and anti-immigrant comments appeared constantly. Female Democratic politicians—Black ones especially—were repeatedly addressed as “bitch” and worse. Name-calling and dehumanizing language about political figures was pervasive, as were QAnon-style beliefs that the world is run by a secret cabal of international child sex traffickers.
In addition to the torrent of vile posts, dozens of top users behaved in spammy ways. We don’t see large-scale evidence of bot or nonhuman accounts in our data, and comments have traditionally been the hardest activity to fake at scale. But we do see many accounts that copy and paste identical rants across many posts on different pages. Other accounts posted repeated links to the same misinformation videos or fake news sites. Many accounts also repeated one- or two-word comments—often as simple as “yes” or “YES !!”—dozens and dozens of times, an unusual behavior for most users. Whether this behavior was coordinated or not, these throwaway comments gave a huge boost to MSI, and signaled to Facebook’s algorithm that this is what users want to see.
In many cases, this toxic mix of misinformation and hate culminated in fantasies about political violence. Many wanted to shoot, run over, hang, burn, or blow up Black Lives Matter protesters, “illegals,” or Democratic members of Congress. They typically justified this violence with racist falsehoods or imaginary claims about antifa. Many top users boasted that they were ready for the seemingly inevitable violence, that they were buying guns, that they were “locked and loaded.”
These disturbing comments were not just empty talk: Many of those indicted for participating in the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol also appear in our data. We were able to connect the first 380 individuals charged to 210 Facebook accounts; 123 of these were publicly active during the time our data set was constructed, and 51 left more than 1,200 comments total. The content of those comments mirrors the top 1 percent of users in their abusive language—further illustrating the risk associated with pretending that harmful users are just a few bad apples among a more civil general user base.
Recommendation algorithms change over time, and Facebook is notoriously secretive about its inner workings. Our research captures an important but still-limited snapshot of the platform. But so long as user engagement remains the most important ingredient in how Facebook recommends content, it will continue to give its worst users the most influence. And if things are this bad in the United States, where Facebook’s moderation efforts are most active, they are likely much worse everywhere else.
Allowing a small set of people who behave horribly to dominate the platform is Facebook’s choice, not an inevitability. If each of Facebook’s 15,000 U.S. moderators aggressively reviewed several dozen of the most active users and permanently removed those guilty of repeated violations, abuse on Facebook would drop drastically within days. But so would overall user engagement.
Perhaps this is why we found that Facebook rarely takes action, even against the worst offenders. Of the 150 accounts with clear abusive behavior in our sample, only seven were suspended a year later. Facebook may publicly condemn users who post hate, spread misinformation, and hunger for violence. In private, though, hundreds of thousands of repeat offenders still rank among the most important people on Facebook.
The Atlantic · by Matthew Hindman, Nathaniel Lubin, Trevor Davis · February 10, 2022
29. The U.S. Should Want a Cold War With China
Ideological competition. Political warfare competition. Politics is war by other means.
Excerpts:
The U.S. should highlight the totalitarian nature of the Chinese Communist Party and demonstrate that there is a better way for Chinese citizens to live. The U.S. remains an attractive place for ordinary Chinese people. More than half of China’s top-tier researchers end up moving to the U.S., which has the highest-ranked universities and the highest-grossing technology companies. China may be able to keep up with the U.S. militarily, but it can’t compete in a broad and sustained competition for hearts and minds.
In 1938, Winston Churchill saw that fascism and liberal democracy were on a collision course. Rather than shy away from the threat, he recognized that “the antagonism is here now.” Instead of viewing this ideological competition as a liability, Churchill saw that the “conflict of spiritual and moral ideas” is what “gives the free countries a great part of their strength.” If the competition with China is truly about the future of the 21st century—whether democracy as a creed and the American experiment as a civilization can survive in the face of its greatest challenge yet—the U.S. should be ecstatic at the prospects of a cold war.
If fruitful cooperation is a fantasy and a hot war is a nightmare, a cold war with China is the lucid dream that Mr. Biden and his successors should embrace.
The U.S. Should Want a Cold War With China
Competition, not cooperation, is the best way to avoid direct military confrontation.
WSJ · by Gabriel Scheinmann
At the U.N., Mr. Biden warned that cooperation is the only responsible way “to address the urgent threats like Covid-19 and climate change or enduring threats like nuclear proliferation.” A cold-war mentality, he said, could easily “tip from responsible competition to conflict,” leading to a serious military catastrophe. This was clearly on the president’s mind in August when he justified the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan by comparing it favorably to Vietnam.
In fact, a cold war with China would mean averting a direct military confrontation. Even better, a cold war is a winnable war.
Some have speculated that rapid technological change in autonomous weaponry through artificial intelligence and robotics would make avoiding war more difficult. But the Cold War lasted more than four decades without tipping into World War III, even amid a technological revolution that made mutually assured destruction possible at the flick of a switch. American military strength deterred a Soviet attack, while major investments by Washington in the political and economic stability of important states such as Japan, France, West Germany and Italy countered Soviet subversion and coercion. The framework proved that arms races don’t necessarily lead to armed conflict.
At the beginning of the Cold War, the U.S. was in a far better economic and military position than the Soviet Union. The American economy accounted for half of global gross domestic product, and Washington was able to establish strong postwar alliances quickly. The Soviet Union, by contrast, had suffered enormously during World War II, losing a large percentage of its population and productive capacity. It could strike alliances only through fear, coercion or invasion.
Today, the American geopolitical position is strong even if Chinese gains have eroded the overall U.S. military advantage. The U.S. and its allies represent 50% of global GDP. Washington is allied with or has increasingly friendly relations with nearly every country in Asia. The strength of American soft power underscores the appeal of the U.S. democratic system and the American way of life.
The Chinese government, on the other hand, fears its own people. Beijing’s internal security budget has grown faster than its national defense budget. Despite last week’s public display of affection between Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin in Beijing, China has no major allies and its behavior is driving increasingly unfriendly relations with nearly every nation. Deterring a Chinese attack on Taiwan is important, but it isn’t the only measure of who has the stronger geopolitical position.
A cold war means a full-spectrum competition, allowing the U.S. to compete in domains where it has comparative advantages, such as finance, higher education and advanced engineering. Hard power will be necessary but not sufficient for “winning the 21st century.” In the late 20th century, strength bought time, but it was ultimately the moral corruption and ideological hypocrisy of the Soviet Union that caused its collapse. It could control and rule its citizens only through fear. When the fear began to crack, its rule was no more.
The U.S. should highlight the totalitarian nature of the Chinese Communist Party and demonstrate that there is a better way for Chinese citizens to live. The U.S. remains an attractive place for ordinary Chinese people. More than half of China’s top-tier researchers end up moving to the U.S., which has the highest-ranked universities and the highest-grossing technology companies. China may be able to keep up with the U.S. militarily, but it can’t compete in a broad and sustained competition for hearts and minds.
In 1938, Winston Churchill saw that fascism and liberal democracy were on a collision course. Rather than shy away from the threat, he recognized that “the antagonism is here now.” Instead of viewing this ideological competition as a liability, Churchill saw that the “conflict of spiritual and moral ideas” is what “gives the free countries a great part of their strength.” If the competition with China is truly about the future of the 21st century—whether democracy as a creed and the American experiment as a civilization can survive in the face of its greatest challenge yet—the U.S. should be ecstatic at the prospects of a cold war.
If fruitful cooperation is a fantasy and a hot war is a nightmare, a cold war with China is the lucid dream that Mr. Biden and his successors should embrace.
Mr. Scheinmann is executive director of the Alexander Hamilton Society.
WSJ · by Gabriel Scheinmann
30. The Canadian trucker spectacle is an American export
Excerpts:
In this way, the protests have blended personal and political grievances with far-reaching, sometimes violent anti-government and extremist messaging.
“There are legitimate political grievances,” said Bridgman. “It’s just that they come associated with all of this baggage, that it becomes very difficult to talk about those political grievances divorced from the misinformation, the hate, the racism, the violence, the disruption, the lawlessness. How do you separate those two in a movement like this?”
The Canadian trucker spectacle is an American export
Right-wing ideology has crossed the border.
Misinformation Reporter
In the two weeks that protesters have taken over the streets of Ottawa, Canada’s capital city, a fringe movement by some truckers ostensibly against covid restrictions has exploded into a global spectacle. On the ground, the movement reflects the northern spread of American right-wing ideology across the border. But the spectacle is very real, causing some residents to leave their homes and overwhelming downtown businesses and organizations.
The self-described Freedom Convoy has come to encompass broader anti-government views, including far-right viewpoints. Just over 400 trucks remain in downtown Ottawa, and protesters now demand more than an end to vaccine mandates. Some now call for a full end to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government — and some want to form their own.
Hate symbols — including Nazi swastikas — have appeared, and local residents have reported being harassed and assaulted by protesters. A youth services provider closed a downtown drop-in shelter. An ice cream shop closed temporarily, saying its staff was being harassed for wearing masks. Police are investigating an alleged attempted arson of a residential building.
For their part, protesters enjoy adulation from conservative politicians and media in the United States and elsewhere. Crowdsourced fundraisers for the convoys have raised at least $8 million, although it is unclear where the money is going or how it will be distributed. It is also unclear where much of that money — some of which has been contributed in four- and five-figure increments — is coming from.
Surprising to see outside the seat of Canadian power are symbols of the American right wing, including Confederate flags and Three Percenter emblems, representing the unproven idea that only 3 percent of American colonists fought in the American Revolution.
This reflects the staggering influence of American right-wing media, said Aengus Bridgman, a doctoral candidate at McGill University who has researched how misinformation crosses national borders.
“The rhetoric, the symbolism, the language is American,” he said. In general, he added, it is exciting when political movements unfold in the streets, a demonstration of democracy beyond simply voting every few years.
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“The less exciting part is just this: as a Canadian, watching ... the people who are interested in getting politically involved being sort of co-opted or encouraged by or influenced by this real, deep American culture war around the legitimacy of measures taken to combat covid-19,” he said. “This simplification of politics, the language that is being imported is really concerning.”
On the ground
In nearly two weeks, police have issued 1,300 traffic tickets, opened 85 criminal investigations and made 23 arrests, according to the CBC.
Officials are investigating an alleged attempted arson. Security footage from inside a residential building shows two alleged convoy members entering, taping up doors and lighting a fire before leaving through a side door. According to building tenant Matias Muñoz, a passing good Samaritan spotted the fire from outside and extinguished it.
At a city council meeting on Monday, Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson said that event demonstrated “obvious criminal intent.”
“The lives of innocent people are at risk, right now, right here,” Watson said. He previously declared a state of emergency in the city on Sunday.
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Police response has been mixed. As of Tuesday, more than 400 trucks remained. About a quarter of those had children in them, according to Ottawa’s Deputy Police Chief Steve Bell, and police and the Children’s Aid Society of Ottawa have expressed concerns about youth exposure to noise and fumes.
On Wednesday, Ottawa police released a statement that blocking streets downtown would constitute criminal mischief.
“We are providing you notice that anyone blocking streets or assisting others in the block of streets may be committing a criminal offence,” the statement reads.
In the protest’s first week, Marc-André Cossette, an investigative journalist with Global News, a division of the Canadian Global Television Network, reported on a party-like atmosphere at the protests, which he likened to a “middle finger” against anti-covid restrictions.
“The protesters were jubilant, but they were seething and disrespectful too,” he tweeted on Jan. 31. “A sizeable group of them — if not most — think their frustration gives them licence to harass and intimidate anyone abiding by the public health that we as [a] society has set for ourselves.”
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Cossette observed protesters harassing employees of local businesses and reporters. Residents have shared stories on social media of relentless noise, including truck horns and fireworks at all hours of the day.
On Monday, a judge placed a 10-day hold on honking. But some downtown residents have left their homes, telling local media they have been driven to exhaustion or felt physically unsafe. On Reddit, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, residents described and shared videos of being harassed for wearing masks and of protesters vandalizing houses with LGBTQ+ Pride flags.
Some downtown businesses reported closing or reducing hours out of fear for the safety of their staffs. Nonprofit organizations also cited concerns that the populations they serve were particularly at risk.
A homeless services provider reported its employees were being harassed and assaulted; a youth services group closed a drop-in center out of safety concerns; and a downtown women’s shelter reported that many of their residents and staff also felt fear, and were overwhelmed by the honking and noise of the trucks.
“Women and staff are scared to go outside of the shelter, especially women of color,” a statement from the women’s shelter reads. “Being able to go outside is the only reprieve many women experiencing homelessness have and they cannot even do that.”
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A nonprofit for Indigenous youth, called the Assembly of Seven Generations released a statement saying that the population they serve were afraid to leave their homes, and suffered wage loss from businesses being closed. The group condemned the protests as an “occupation” of downtown Ottawa.
As the movement has spread across the country, it has also brought some of this chaos with it. On Saturday, a trucker allegedly rolled into cyclists at a sister action in Vancouver. Nobody was seriously hurt in that incident, and the trucker was fired from his company.
On Tuesday, the Canadian Human Rights Commission, a government agency, released a statement condemning acts of “aggression, intimidation and assault,” and describing citizens feeling unsafe, angry and grief-stricken.
“Brazenly displaying symbols of hatred and white supremacy is a threat to our democracy and our peace and prosperity,” the statement reads. “The hate-fueled aggression levelled at citizens, on the streets, in their neighbourhoods, on their doorstep and online runs counter to our values and our laws.”
The shape and meaning of the protests
Nevertheless, many protesters appear to still be having a good time, some cooking out and playing music. Their anti-government sentiment isn’t new to Canada, said Bridgman, the misinformation researcher. But the rhetoric of the movement is particularly Americanized and not necessarily reflective of Canadian politics or culture, he said.
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The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms “has much more recognition of group rights and the ability for kind of collective rights to override rights of the individual in specific instances” than the U.S. Constitution, he said.
“So when you see in these protests, the language of freedom — you know, ‘They’re taking away our freedom’ — this is a very individualized notion of liberty that … is unusual in the Canadian context.”
Alongside right-wing American symbols, like Confederate and militia flags, some phrases from right-wing contexts have been translated for a Canadian audience. For example, instead of displaying the message “Let’s Go, Brandon,” which has become a popular coded slur against the U.S. president, one vehicle in the Ottawa convoy displayed a French-language version, aimed at Trudeau: “Brandeau, allons-y.”
The presence of these images and ideas reflects the absorption of American right-wing media, Bridgman said.
“There’s really strong evidence that Canadians consume a huge amount of U.S. news, and those who do consume a lot of U.S. news have many more misperceptions about covid-19, about vaccines,” he said. “And what we see in terms of these protests is, the people who are consuming a lot of this sort of conspiratorial news in the states are imitating that language here.”
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Protesters also express strong distrust and dislike of media, sometimes interrupting broadcasters to accuse them of being fake news. On Wednesday, organizers held a press conference for only invited members of the media.
CTV News was explicitly banned from the conference; that same day, Jeremy Thompson, an anchor for CTV Edmonton, tweeted that the broadcaster was removing its brand from company vehicles, citing safety concerns.
“This is a sad day for me,” Thompson wrote. “I am proud of the excellent and vital work we do, perhaps more important now than ever. I’m proud to represent that in public, but it’s just not safe right now.”
Amid the extremism, some protesters also use the convoy as an opportunity to vent their grief and anger about what (and who) they have lost due to measures implemented to stop the pandemic’s spread.
One woman interviewed by David Freiheit, better known as Viva Frei, a YouTuber who supports the movement, attended the protests with a photograph of her son. She said he died of a fentanyl overdose on New Year’s Day of 2021, leaving behind an infant daughter — and blames lockdowns for causing him to relapse. Without steady work, hobbies and sobriety meetings, his support structure deteriorated, she said.
In this way, the protests have blended personal and political grievances with far-reaching, sometimes violent anti-government and extremist messaging.
“There are legitimate political grievances,” said Bridgman. “It’s just that they come associated with all of this baggage, that it becomes very difficult to talk about those political grievances divorced from the misinformation, the hate, the racism, the violence, the disruption, the lawlessness. How do you separate those two in a movement like this?”
Morgan Richardson contributed to this report.
V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
