Quotes of the Day:
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“In 1943 or 1944, an officer from Gen. Marshall’s secretary came into the office of Lt. Gen. William H. Wood… This officer said, “Gen. Marshall wants an officer for a secret and dangerous mission. He wants a West Point football player.” Gen. Wood, now…then rather a lieutenant colonel, came to me a few hours after this incident and told me about it."- The story behind the quote and plaque. General George C. Marshall (VMI Football Player) - https://www.marshallfoundation.org/blog/marshall-myth-west-point-football-player/
“What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.”
- Salman Rushdie
“I'm not, like, a book guy, but isn't the point of all this book stuff like what Ms. Croft was teaching us -- that unrestricted access to books allows us to be challenged and changed? To learn new things and to critically think about those things and not be afraid of them? To be better than we were before we read them?”
- David Connis, Suggested Reading
1. What Congressional funding reveals about America’s military priorities
2. Uyghur Tribunal delivers final summary judgment
3. China Wants to Rule the World by Controlling the Rules
4. Israel’s Arabs are the latest victim of Iran’s proxy wars
5. FDD | Biden Administration Creates Potential Sanctions Loophole for Assad
6. The Decline of American Empire: A Kübler-Ross Cycle Analysis
7. If the United States pulls back, the world will become more dangerous
8. A huge study of 20 years of global wealth demolishes the myth of 'trickle-down' and shows the rich are taking most of the gains for themselves
9. Keep It Separate: Why America Wants a Marine Corps
10. Biden Acknowledges US Democratic Vulnerabilities at Summit Opening
11. The Humanities May Be Declining at Universities — But They’re Thriving on Zoom
12. Spies and Starbucks Cards: The Unlikely Link Between Espionage and Food
13. Why Russia won’t likely invade Ukraine
14. Embrace the Arms Race in Asia
15. Swarm Talk: Understanding Drone Typology
16. The China threat and lessons from the collapse of the Soviet Union
17. Is this how World War III begins?
18. Soon, the Hackers Won’t Be Human - But AI Can Boost Cyber Defenses, Too
19. Healing Washington and Beijing’s wounded relationship
20. Ranger Regiment: What we know about Army's new elite force (UK)
21. China trolls Biden summit with Harry Potter jokes and claims to be a democracy
22. At the Democracy Summit, Biden Bungles Again
23. Four Ways the U.S. Can Keep Putin From Invading Ukraine
1. What Congressional funding reveals about America’s military priorities
Excerpts:
Politics also complicates efforts to tackle the lingering costs of the war on terror. The bill would require the air force to continue acquisitions of the MQ-9 Reaper, a drone platform used for counter-terrorism operations but derided by the air force brass as expensive and vulnerable in a great-power conflict. Despite America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan and reduced footprint in the Middle East, Congress has kept funding for the army largely intact. Though a broad bipartisan group of senators promoted a repeal of the redundant 2002 Authorisation for the Use of Military Force against Iraq, the measure was left out. The bill also reaffirms the long-standing provision barring the president from transferring Guantánamo detainees to courts on the American mainland, ensuring the prison will remain open.
Despite, or perhaps because of, the broad support for defence spending, hundreds of amendments were offered in both chambers of Congress, including many with only a tangential relationship to defence. “It’s becoming a vehicle for everyone’s legislation,” says Mr Clark. After passing the bill, Congress still needs to appropriate the funds it has authorised in the NDAA. The secretary of defence, Lloyd Austin, warned lawmakers in a public statement that a failure to do so promptly would be catastrophic. Having run up a big bill, Congress still has to settle it.
What Congressional funding reveals about America’s military priorities
Members are happy to fund hardware, but reluctant to let the Department of Defence make cuts
Dec 11th 2021
WASHINGTON, DC
ANYONE WHO has observed Congress over the past decade will be familiar with 11th-hour, slapdash policymaking. The National Defence Authorisation Act (NDAA)—the annual defence-policy bill and one of the few routine, bipartisan pieces of legislation—has followed a familiar pattern. After months of delays in which one of the largest budget categories, was pushed to the back burner in favour of other Democratic priorities, the Senate seemed to abandon efforts to pass the $768bn defence bill (which includes $147bn to buy new hardware) for the 2022 fiscal year. Leaders from both parties eventually compromised and the law passed the House this week. Amid the scramble it was easy to overlook what members of Congress think the mammoth defence budget should actually be for. Following the money reveals where lawmakers think America’s defence priorities lie.
From a distance, the budget appears to be guided by a strengthening bipartisan consensus that America must confront China and spend more to do so. Look closer, and disagreements abound. Exactly how the country should compete with its Pacific rival divides both parties. Even as America embarks on a new contest in Asia, lawmakers do not agree with one another, or with President Joe Biden, over how to address other pressing issues, most prominently a revanchist Russia. Nor have they proved capable of either ending the war on terror or voting to continue it.
The current Congress’s free-spending habits are bipartisan when it comes to security. Mr Biden’s proposed defence budget, released in May, entailed only a modest increase, an attempt to placate doves on his left flank. But the rest of the legislature was not pleased. Both chambers added $25bn to the president’s proposal. The total package is now the largest in a decade, the result of a rising anxiety on both sides of the aisle in Congress that America is losing its military advantage, particularly on the high seas.
For America’s armed forces, matching their Chinese competitors requires shedding older weapons platforms in favour of those at the cutting-edge, such as unmanned ships. Lawmakers have long been sceptical of this move to “divest to invest”, in Pentagon jargon. Bryan Clark of the Hudson Institute, a think-tank, suggests this scepticism is reasonable. “They feel the military has gone down this road multiple times of saying the next thing is so much better, but then it never arrives.”
Following that logic, Congress is handing the Pentagon substantially more money to buy proven designs and strengthen America’s presence in the Pacific. Besides securing 13 new ships, including three Arleigh Burke-class destroyers and two Virginia-class submarines, the law would authorise procurement of 347 aircraft, well above the Pentagon’s initial request for 290. This builds on a clear preference for the navy and air force dating to the end of the Obama administration, with spending on the former growing by 62% since the 2015 fiscal year. That, paired with $7bn for the Pacific Deterrence Initiative, a fund to bolster regional allies, is a measure of Congress’s interest in a robust military response to rising Chinese power in Asia.
Beneath this consensus, however, lie disagreements. Increased defence spending is opposed by the progressive left and libertarian right, which favour diplomacy, echoing the inclination toward restraint in foreign policy that is finding wider purchase in Washington. The US Innovation and Competition Act, an industrial-policy bill framed in anti-China terms and championed by the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, was kept separate from the defence bill after opposition from some Republicans, who spied a new form of corporate welfare. An effort to prohibit trade in goods made from slave labour in China’s Xinjiang region was met with quiet resistance from the White House and helped derail negotiations in the Senate, only to be left out of the compromise bill.
And while Congress is keen to spend money on new kit, members are less enthusiastic about making the difficult decisions necessary to rebalance the armed forces and put them on a sound fiscal footing. Seamus Daniels of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a think-tank, finds that personnel costs account for nearly a third of the Pentagon’s budget, a figure that keeps rising despite America fielding the fewest troops in decades. These obligations to current and retired warriors (who cost more due to health-care expenses) crowd out funds for new weapons and research, but Congress is loath to tackle such a politically sensitive issue. Even as lawmakers push funding towards new systems, they show little appetite to give up on ageing ones, such as the Ticonderoga-class cruisers, creating an ongoing drain on scarce resources. “If Congress were to let divestments happen, the air force could acquire everything they wanted without increasing the budget at all,” says Travis Sharp of the Centre for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
Though Mr Biden would like to concentrate on China, Congress has other ideas. While the president attempts to both reassure European allies and cool tensions with Russia, lawmakers have taken a more maximalist approach. The defence bill allocates $4bn for European defence, as well as $300m for Ukraine’s armed forces, both greater sums than the president requested. While many legislators in both parties have supported sanctions on firms affiliated with Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline, Republicans proposed an amendment that would have overridden Mr Biden’s waiver of current sanctions, forcing Democrats to take a difficult vote. The measure did not make the final text.
Politics also complicates efforts to tackle the lingering costs of the war on terror. The bill would require the air force to continue acquisitions of the MQ-9 Reaper, a drone platform used for counter-terrorism operations but derided by the air force brass as expensive and vulnerable in a great-power conflict. Despite America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan and reduced footprint in the Middle East, Congress has kept funding for the army largely intact. Though a broad bipartisan group of senators promoted a repeal of the redundant 2002 Authorisation for the Use of Military Force against Iraq, the measure was left out. The bill also reaffirms the long-standing provision barring the president from transferring Guantánamo detainees to courts on the American mainland, ensuring the prison will remain open.
Despite, or perhaps because of, the broad support for defence spending, hundreds of amendments were offered in both chambers of Congress, including many with only a tangential relationship to defence. “It’s becoming a vehicle for everyone’s legislation,” says Mr Clark. After passing the bill, Congress still needs to appropriate the funds it has authorised in the NDAA. The secretary of defence, Lloyd Austin, warned lawmakers in a public statement that a failure to do so promptly would be catastrophic. Having run up a big bill, Congress still has to settle it. ■
This article appeared in the United States section of the print edition under the headline "Money for something"
2. Uyghur Tribunal delivers final summary judgment
Thanks to a friend and Northeast Asia security expert for providing the summary below and the link to the 68 page judgment at the link.
Uyghur Tribunal delivers final summary judgment
More about the Uyghur Tribunal is below:
It is alleged that the People’s Republic of China (“PRC”) has and continues to perpetrate the most serious of international crimes against the Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other Turkic Muslims in the Uyghur region of North West China.
In June 2020 Dolkun Isa, President of the World Uyghur Congress formally requested that Sir Geoffrey Nice QC establish and chair an independent people’s tribunal to investigate ‘ongoing atrocities and possible Genocide’ against the Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other Turkic Muslim Populations. The Uyghur Tribunal (“Tribunal”) was launched on 3 September 2020 with assistance from a non-governmental organisation, the Coalition for Genocide Response.
The Tribunal will act wholly independently although it will continue to benefit from evidence provided by a range of organisations.
Hearings
There will be two sets of Hearings, at which witnesses will present live evidence. These will be open to the public and streamed live.
The first hearings will be from 4 to 7 June 2021, and the second hearings will be from 10 to 13 September 2021.
Objectives
If it were realistically possible to bring the PRC to any formal international court – in particular to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) – there would be no need for the establishment of a people’s tribunal.
There is no such possibility not least because China/the PRC, although a signatory to and ratifier of the Genocide Convention, has entered a reservation against ICJ jurisdiction. There is no known route to any other court that can deal with the issues before the tribunal.
The Uyghur Tribunal, which has no powers of sanction or enforcement, will confine itself to reviewing evidence in order to reach an impartial and considered judgment on whether international crimes are proved to have been committed by the PRC.
It will be for States, international institutions, commercial companies, art, medical and educational establishments and individuals to determine how to apply the Tribunal’s Judgment, whatever it may be, in their dealings with the PRC. This could include, but is not limited to, trade and other sanctions including against individuals, proscribing the sale of technologies, surveillance and medical equipment and the declaration of ineligibility for visas.
All the evidence considered by the Tribunal will form a permanent record, which may, depending on the judgment delivered, serve as a deterrent to impunity.
No present or future members of the Tribunal or the Secretariat are activists in any Uyghur cause.
Background
Since launch the Tribunal has attracted significant press and other interest reflective of the gravity of the issue.
The Uyghurs are a predominantly Turkic Muslim group and in the Uyghur region are estimated to number upwards of twelve million people.
It has been widely reported that the PRC is detaining a significant proportion of the Uyghur, Kazakh and other Turkic Muslim populations in camps which the PRC says are “vocational training centres” or “re-education centres” but are widely alleged to be involuntary detention centres which some have likened to “concentration camps”.
There have been numerous other allegations of the PRC subjecting the Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other Turkic Muslim Populations to killings, serious bodily or mental harm including torture, rape and other sexual violence, enslavement, forced separation of children from their parents, forced sterilisation, forcible transfer or deportation, apartheid, forced labour, forced organ harvesting, enforced disappearances, destruction of cultural or religious heritage, persecution, forced marriages and the imposition of Han Chinese men into Uyghur households.
If proved, some of these allegations could lead to the conclusion that the PRC has embarked on a campaign intended to destroy, in whole or in part, the Uyghur people and their existence as a religious, racial, national and ethnic group. Such a finding would constitute the commission of Genocide as defined in Article 2 of the Convention of 1948 to which the PRC is a signatory and ratifying state. Acts arising from or incidental to the prohibited acts of Genocide, may also in themselves constitute crimes against humanity.
3. China Wants to Rule the World by Controlling the Rules
Excerpts:
“It’s really about replacing a rule-of-law, equality-between-states system with a hierarchical sensibility that privileges authoritarianism,” Matt Pottinger, chair of the China program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and deputy national security adviser in the Trump administration, told me. If Beijing succeeds, he added, “the international order would be far more Machiavellian, and the UN system would reward the most Mafia-like players.”
That’s bad enough for the U.S., but it’s downright dangerous for countries that aren’t superpowers—which means most of them. These countries seek protection in a rules-based order, one where they can (at least in theory) stand up to bullying from more powerful states by utilizing the rule of law. One reason the government of Australia has taken a hard line on aspects of Chinese foreign policy is its commitment to defending the current order. Former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull wrote last year that “it was manifestly in our interests to maintain respect for the rule of law in our region because that was the only way we, and other smaller states, could be sure of preserving our own freedom and sovereignty.”
Confronted by this opposing set of global rules, Washington continues to try to uphold its own. Huawei is still facing Justice Department lawsuits, for theft of trade secrets and racketeering, among other charges. (A Huawei spokesperson said the company “will continue to defend itself” in the latter case but had no comment on the former.) The U.S. Navy routinely sends squadrons through the South China Sea to maintain freedom of navigation, shrugging off apoplectic tirades from Beijing. President Joe Biden has proposed an alternative to China’s Belt and Road Initiative that would strengthen standards of development and lending for needy nations. Washington also looks set to initiate a new regional economic partnership in Asia.
The United States might also consider joining and bolstering agreements such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Though considered a trade pact, TPP is, in fact, packed with standards on labor and environmental protections, as well as other key issues for the global economy.
In the end, the U.S. and China will likely never agree on what the global order should be, and they’re never likely to abide by the other’s rules. Ultimately, neither power can fully enforce its version of the rules, either. To a certain extent, they both prefer it that way. “The big powers don’t want impartial independent adjudication of their behavior under prevailing international norms,” Cohen pointed out. “They want to settle things themselves.”
China Wants to Rule the World by Controlling the Rules
The American monopoly on international rule-writing is facing its stiffest challenge since the fall of the Soviet Union.
By Michael Schuman
To truly understand the contours of the growing competition between the United States and China, look beyond the corridors of power in Washington and Beijing, past the tensions in the waters and skies around Taiwan, away from the bellicose rhetoric at international forums, and even off the tennis court, the new front opened by the trauma of Peng Shuai. Instead, look to the courtroom.
In the U.S. and much of the liberal West, the concept of the “rule of law” is vital to a properly functioning society—the idea (at least in theory) that the law is impartial, independent, and applied evenly and consistently to all, and that it serves to protect the innocent, including from the state. China’s leaders, however, follow the concept of the “rule by law,” in which the legal system is a tool used to assure Communist Party dominance; courts are forums for imposing the government’s will. The state can do just about anything it wants, and then find some helpful language in the “laws” to justify it.
To see these differing perspectives in action, consider the case of Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of the Chinese telecom giant Huawei Technologies, who was arrested in Vancouver in late 2018 on behalf of the U.S. Justice Department, which indicted her for bank fraud. From the American point of view, the case was a matter of law enforcement: The Justice Department accused Meng of lying to a major international bank about Huawei’s business in Iran, causing causing financial transactions that violated Washington’s sanctions on that country. Prosecutors were vindicated when Meng confirmed the substance of the case in an agreement reached in September that allowed her to avoid a U.S. trial and return to China.
In Beijing, however, the case was never perceived as anything but political. China’s Foreign Ministry deemed Meng’s indictment “a political frame-up … designed to hobble Chinese high-tech.” Thus for Beijing, the case demanded a political solution. In July, when U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman met with her Chinese counterparts, they handed her two lists of demands that included dropping the case against Meng. Her eventual release was heralded within China as a diplomatic triumph. (Huawei, in a comment attributed to Meng’s lawyer, William W. Taylor, noted that she did not plead guilty, and asserted that “we fully expect the indictment will be dismissed.”)
In a narrow sense, the episode illustrates rival superpowers seeking to pressure each other, just one part of a wider global conflagration. Yet this view misses the larger lesson of the case. Meng’s arrest and subsequent release point to something far deeper and longer-lasting, with the potential to reshape how the modern world works.
For 75 years, the United States has been the world’s self-anointed rule writer and enforcer. Intent on preventing another global bloodletting on the scale of World War II, Washington attempted to craft a world order cemented in shared norms, with international institutions to enshrine and uphold them. Backing it all up was the might of the American military. That order has been imperfect, subject to abuse by an array of countries—America included—but it has kept a lid on big-power conflict, while spreading economic prosperity and democratic principles across much of the globe. It’s an order that, though somewhat tattered, the Biden administration is striving to maintain with, for instance, today’s Summit for Democracy.
But the American monopoly on rule writing is now facing its stiffest challenge since the fall of the Soviet Union. As China rises in stature, Beijing is promoting its own concepts about global governance, development, and international relations, grasping influence at institutions such as the United Nations to infuse these concepts into global discourse, and using its growing wealth and military might to contest the existing norms of the American world system.
Ultimately, this is what the Meng dispute is really about: a widening confrontation between the U.S. and China over who sets the rules on trade and technology, climate change, and public health. Fundamentally, it is about the principles and precepts that guide how countries, companies, and individuals interact on a global scale, a competition over whether the world will be one of the “rule of law” or the “rule by law.”
The main purpose of the West’s original policy of engagement with China was to avoid this very situation. By integrating Beijing into the U.S.-led system, the thinking went, the Chinese leadership would see its benefits and come to support it. On a certain level, the plan succeeded. China has been a major beneficiary of the American order—perhaps the biggest of all. The security, trade, and cross-border investment fostered by the U.S. order propelled China’s rise from poverty, while Beijing eagerly immersed itself in U.S.-backed institutions such as the World Trade Organization.
Yet today, China’s paramount leader, Xi Jinping, appears to consider the U.S. system a constraint on Chinese power. For a proud autocracy, the American order can seem an unfriendly, even threatening place, one where liberal political values reign supreme, and the Chinese form of government is perceived as illegitimate, while Chinese companies and officials are vulnerable to foreign sanction and Chinese ambitions are hemmed in. From Xi’s perspective, it is critical that Beijing rewrite the rules to better suit its interests and, more broadly, those of authoritarian states. Simply, Xi intends to flip the global hierarchy, placing illiberal governments and ideals at its apex.
Xi “wants to dominate the rule of law,” Jerome Cohen, a longtime expert in Chinese law, told me. Xi believes that “you have to have rules that suit the interest of the majority of countries,” and “he sees the Anglo-Americans as being a minority now,” Cohen continued. “That minority should be governed by the autocracies of the world who are amenable to the Chinese point of view.”
The U.S. has faced a similar challenge before, from the Soviet Union during the Cold War. But because China is more integrated into the American order, especially economically, than the Soviets ever were, it presents a more dangerous threat. Beijing is attacking the world order in a pincer movement. From the outside, it markets its ideas, governance, and development model as superior to the West’s; from the inside, it works within the very institutions and networks that bind the U.S. order together.
Take, for instance, the Belt and Road Initiative, Xi’s pet program that finances and builds railways, power stations, and other infrastructure in developing nations. This undertaking is an effort to change the way international development is done by offering an alternative to the established practices of the Western powers and their institutions, such as the World Bank. Beijing’s state banks generally don’t follow the norms on lending to poor nations designed (after much trial and error) by other major creditor countries, nor has China participated in processes to manage that debt, such as the Paris Club. Instead, Chinese lending is based on China’s rules, often with less transparent terms and weaker standards on labor practices, corruption, and environmental protection. Kristen Cordell, a development policy expert, wrote in a 2020 report on Belt and Road that “the willingness of China to abide by international rules and processes for these investments has been secondary to its interest of shaping norms for its favor.”
Meanwhile, China’s inroads at the United Nations show how the country is eating away at the American order from its very core. Beijing is using its influence to promote Belt and Road. It also employs its growing clout to infuse the institution with its own ideological principles on issues such as human rights and state sovereignty. Last year, at the UN’s Human Rights Council, 53 countries sided with China on its controversial imposition of a national-security law on Hong Kong, which allowed authorities to crack down on the city’s prodemocracy movement; at this year’s UN General Assembly, more than 60 members trumpeted China’s position on human rights—essentially, that a nation’s rights violations are none of the world’s business. Taken together, these efforts, a 2019 report by the Center for a New American Security contended, “will hasten the export of some of the most harmful aspects of China’s political system, including corruption, mass surveillance, and the repression of individual and collective rights.”
Elsewhere, Beijing has ignored an international ruling and the protestations of its neighbors over its expansion in the South China Sea, a vital waterway for global trade that it claims is mostly China’s sovereign territory. There, Beijing is effectively attempting to rewrite the standard norms on territorial waters and free navigation, basing its position on China’s purported historical role in the area going back more than 2,000 years to the Han dynasty, and other dubious assertions. To solidify its grip, China has also utilized bullying and threats: Its coast guard harasses other nations’ ships, and its fishing vessels crowd into waters other governments contend they have the right to exploit. Beijing also built man-made islands in the region and stacked them with military installations. The nations that share the South China Sea, all smaller and in some cases poorer, have struggled to hold their own.
And then there is the Meng case. She was ostensibly a private citizen working for an ostensibly private company, but China used the full might of its government apparatus to defend her. Along with raising her case in the meeting with Deputy Secretary of State Sherman and through other channels, Beijing also held two Canadian citizens, the former diplomat Michael Kovrig and the businessman Michael Spavor, who were arrested in China only days after Meng was detained in Canada. The move was widely seen as an attempt to pressure authorities in Ottawa to intervene and short-circuit the extradition process, and the differing treatment of Meng and “the two Michaels” illustrates the gulf in the differing perceptions of the rule of law between the U.S. (and other democracies) and China. While Meng defended herself in public hearings, Kovrig and Spavor faced undefined spying charges in closed-door trials. As the process dragged on, the pair rotted in Chinese prisons while Meng cooled her heels in a Vancouver mansion and indulged in fancy dinners and lavish shopping sprees.
Beijing authorities pretended the affairs weren’t connected, but the truth that the two Canadians were no more than human bargaining chips was laid bare when the pair were immediately released upon Meng’s settlement with the Justice Department. In a postmortem of the affair, Scott Kennedy, senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote that “Beijing’s actions reconfirmed the international community’s conclusion that China has no regard for rule of law.”
What Xi’s world order might look like isn’t clear. He hasn’t elucidated a complete vision for a replacement system. On the surface, the language he proffers to describe the workings of a new order sounds innocuous enough. He talks of a “community of common destiny,” with diplomacy based on “win-win cooperation” and “mutual respect,” in which different social and political systems are accepted. But this is code for a downgrading of democracy. Unlike the current order, in which liberal democracy is held up as the sole legitimate form of governance, Xi’s version would raise authoritarianism to equal, or even superior, status. This would likely result in a world where Washington and its allies can’t decide which states deserve to be sanctioned for the global good, as they define it, one where Chinese executives such as Meng cannot end up in foreign courtrooms for allegedly violating the law. Such a system would suit Beijing’s preference to do business with anybody who wants to buy and trade.
Xi wants to usurp the U.S. role as arbiter of global rights and wrongs, based on an entirely different set of criteria, such as who does and does not support Chinese interests and power. Beijing regularly imposes sanctions of its own on countries it views as a threat to its interests. Australia, for example, has faced severe economic coercion, including effective bans on key exports, for supporting an independent investigation into the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, which Beijing considers an attempt to undermine Communist rule. When Lithuania recently cozied up toTaiwan, Beijing downgraded its diplomatic relations and blocked imports from the country.
“It’s really about replacing a rule-of-law, equality-between-states system with a hierarchical sensibility that privileges authoritarianism,” Matt Pottinger, chair of the China program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and deputy national security adviser in the Trump administration, told me. If Beijing succeeds, he added, “the international order would be far more Machiavellian, and the UN system would reward the most Mafia-like players.”
That’s bad enough for the U.S., but it’s downright dangerous for countries that aren’t superpowers—which means most of them. These countries seek protection in a rules-based order, one where they can (at least in theory) stand up to bullying from more powerful states by utilizing the rule of law. One reason the government of Australia has taken a hard line on aspects of Chinese foreign policy is its commitment to defending the current order. Former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull wrote last year that “it was manifestly in our interests to maintain respect for the rule of law in our region because that was the only way we, and other smaller states, could be sure of preserving our own freedom and sovereignty.”
Confronted by this opposing set of global rules, Washington continues to try to uphold its own. Huawei is still facing Justice Department lawsuits, for theft of trade secrets and racketeering, among other charges. (A Huawei spokesperson said the company “will continue to defend itself” in the latter case but had no comment on the former.) The U.S. Navy routinely sends squadrons through the South China Sea to maintain freedom of navigation, shrugging off apoplectic tirades from Beijing. President Joe Biden has proposed an alternative to China’s Belt and Road Initiative that would strengthen standards of development and lending for needy nations. Washington also looks set to initiate a new regional economic partnership in Asia.
The United States might also consider joining and bolstering agreements such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Though considered a trade pact, TPP is, in fact, packed with standards on labor and environmental protections, as well as other key issues for the global economy.
In the end, the U.S. and China will likely never agree on what the global order should be, and they’re never likely to abide by the other’s rules. Ultimately, neither power can fully enforce its version of the rules, either. To a certain extent, they both prefer it that way. “The big powers don’t want impartial independent adjudication of their behavior under prevailing international norms,” Cohen pointed out. “They want to settle things themselves.”
The battle over rules is really about power—which country has it, and which country can project it. The U.S. has held this power for decades; the Chinese now want it for themselves.
4. Israel’s Arabs are the latest victim of Iran’s proxy wars
Excerpts:
In the aftermath of the Gaza War and the accompanying riots, Israel recently increased its efforts to tackle intra-Arab violence. The coalition agreement with the Islamist Ra’am party included $770,000 to tackle violence and crime in Arab society. Israeli police hope to triple their Muslim officers in the next three years. In September, Israeli police created an undercover unit to combat crime and violence in Arab Israeli communities. And in November, Israel conducted the largest seizure of illegal weapons in the country’s history. Though Israel has seized 15,000 illegal weapons, an estimated 400,000 remain.
On a policy level, Israel’s Ministerial Task Force to Fight Crime and Violence in Arab Society held its first meeting in October. That same month, Israel’s cabinet approved a multi-year plan to combat violence in the Arab sector. More efforts will be needed. But Israel’s attempts to combat this worrying trend will come up short if they do not address the role of Iran and Hezbollah.
Israel’s Arabs are the latest victim of Iran’s proxy wars
Published: 09 December ,2021: 02:15 PM GST
Updated: 09 December ,2021: 03:08 PM GST
A 45-year-old Arab man was murdered in Nazareth recently – it was the 116th violent death this year in Israel’s Arab communities, and the third in that same week. This is more than merely a domestic rise in crime. According to a recent media report, an Israeli police official said the Iran-backed Hezbollah terrorist group has been working overtime to smuggle weapons to Israel’s Arab communities. Their goal is to overthrow the Israeli state. But Israel’s Arab community is clearly the victim.
The Islamic Republic of Iran and its violent proxies have left a trail of death and destruction throughout the Middle East in recent decades. Through proxies and direct action, Iran has inserted itself in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen. The result has been catastrophic in each case. Economic collapse, food insecurity, the rise of organized non-state actors, and bloodshed are hallmarks of Iran’s hegemonic designs on the region.
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Israel has long been the Islamic Republic’s top target. But this particular tactic is a new one. What’s not new: Iran is willing to sacrifice Arabs in its long-term goal of destroying the Jewish state.
Israel is trying to get a grip on this new challenge. The Israeli police official reportedly described a several fold increase in weapons smuggling attempts from Lebanon almost exclusively via Hezbollah. Officials called it a “strategic threat,” noting that the weapons were mostly destined for criminal organizations to be used against Israel’s Jews and to overthrow the state.
The effort to flood Israel’s Arab communities with weapons comes on the heels of the domestic unrest and sectarian violence that occurred during the war between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip this May. While rockets were hurtling into Israeli airspace from Gaza, riots broke out in the heart of Israel’s “mixed cities” with significant Arab and Jewish populations. The strife became so intense that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared a state of emergency in the town of Lod.
Israeli police officers stand guard during a protest by Israeli Arabs in the northern city of Nazareth. (Reuters)
Inspired by this sectarian strife, Hezbollah now seeks to arm Israeli Arabs in a bid to make their riots more lethal. But the Israelis are intent to stop this. Since the May unrest, Israel has thwarted numerous smuggling attempts from Lebanon. In June, Israel circumvented a smuggling operation with 15 handguns, ammunition, and 80 pounds of hashish. In July, Israel thwarted an attempt to smuggle 43 weapons and more than $800,000 worth of ammunition from Lebanon. And in October, Israel’s Border Police foiled another weapons and drugs smuggling operation from Lebanon. Israeli security forces identified Hezbollah as the primary suspect behind this activity.
Weapons are still getting through, however. And the impact has been catastrophic. Though Arabs make up about 20 percent of Israel’s population, they account for 70 percent of the country’s homicides this year. Murders in the Arab sector have jumped from 58 in 2013 to 116 and counting in 2021.
There will, of course, be those who claim that Israel shares some of the blame. Lower government spending in Arab towns have certainly exacerbated the problem. However, there are other causes that might help explain the high levels of violent crime among Israeli Arabs, including clan or family rivalries. But the problem has reached a crisis level thanks to the Iran-backed Hezbollah’s effort to flood Arab streets with weapons.
In the aftermath of the Gaza War and the accompanying riots, Israel recently increased its efforts to tackle intra-Arab violence. The coalition agreement with the Islamist Ra’am party included $770,000 to tackle violence and crime in Arab society. Israeli police hope to triple their Muslim officers in the next three years. In September, Israeli police created an undercover unit to combat crime and violence in Arab Israeli communities. And in November, Israel conducted the largest seizure of illegal weapons in the country’s history. Though Israel has seized 15,000 illegal weapons, an estimated 400,000 remain.
On a policy level, Israel’s Ministerial Task Force to Fight Crime and Violence in Arab Society held its first meeting in October. That same month, Israel’s cabinet approved a multi-year plan to combat violence in the Arab sector. More efforts will be needed. But Israel’s attempts to combat this worrying trend will come up short if they do not address the role of Iran and Hezbollah.
Read more:
5. FDD | Biden Administration Creates Potential Sanctions Loophole for Assad
Excerpts:
While the administration is unlikely to reverse its new rules for NGOs in Syria, it can mitigate risks by strictly defining what constitutes “early recovery” and by explicitly prohibiting the use of property or other assets belonging to displaced Syrians or otherwise seized, expropriated, or confiscated by the regime for political purposes. Concurrently, the administration should impose sanctions against Syrian government officials and their associates engaged in the seizure of property or other assets of displaced Syrians.
Without peace, reconstruction only subsidizes the Assad regime.
FDD | Biden Administration Creates Potential Sanctions Loophole for Assad
fdd.org · by David Adesnik Senior Fellow and Director of Research and Matthew Zweig Senior Fellow· December 9, 2021
The Biden administration in late November lifted a longstanding rule that forbade non-governmental organizations (NGOs) from doing business with the regime of Syrian despot Bashar al-Assad, justifying the move as a humanitarian gesture. In light of the regime’s pervasive diversion and expropriation of humanitarian assistance, the new rule may benefit Assad without meaningfully improving conditions for civilians.
The administration announced its decision in the final hours before the Thanksgiving holiday, indicating a desire to minimize publicity. To effect the change, the Treasury Department amended one of the general licenses that carve out exceptions to Treasury’s Syria Sanctions Regulations. Previously, that license allowed NGOs only to export or re-export to Syria certain services that would otherwise be prohibited. It now permits NGOs to transact with the government of Syria, including the central bank. It also permits NGOs to engage in economic activities defined as “new investment.”
By allowing new investment, the revised license facilitates “early-recovery activities,” a category of aid that goes beyond immediate relief and begins to resemble reconstruction efforts. Last July, after Russia withdrew its threat to veto UN cross-border aid into northwestern Syria, the Biden administration agreed to the passage of a Security Council resolution expressing support for early-recovery activities in areas under Assad’s control.
The United States and its European allies maintain a policy of opposing reconstruction in Syria until the Assad regime negotiates a peaceful resolution of the country’s 10-year conflict. Until July, U.S. policy included opposition to early-recovery activities, since their definition is nebulous, enabling the Assad regime to pursue reconstruction under the guise of early recovery. Support for early recovery could even facilitate the regime’s efforts to create permanent housing developments on land expropriated from displaced or expelled citizens.
In addition to amending its general license, the Treasury Department issued new guidance that provides examples of early-recovery activities, such as rehabilitating school buildings or irrigation systems. These are unobjectionable, yet the guidance makes no effort to clarify the limits of what constitutes early recovery, so the risk remains undiminished.
The Syrian regime has demonstrated its ability to manipulate aid providers, up to and including the United Nations, via intimidation, infiltration, and surveillance. To operate in areas under the regime’s control, aid organizations have no choice but to accept constant interference in their activities. Before allowing NGOs greater latitude to do business directly with the regime, the Biden administration should have put in place guardrails, such as independent monitoring requirements.
If the administration wants as much aid as possible to reach its intended recipients, its top priority should be reforming the UN aid delivery process. An analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies found that the Assad regime’s distortion of exchange rates “allowed it to divert 51 cents of every international aid dollar spent in Syria in 2020,” directing $60 million to the central bank instead of to civilians. Similar diversions in 2019 bring the total losses to more than $100 million. And this is only one means of diversion.
In the absence of reform, greenlighting early-recovery activities and NGO transactions with the regime also undermines the bipartisan Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act of 2019. That law targets, inter alia, persons providing the Assad regime with construction and engineering services, since projects such as Marota City have become vehicles for high-level corruption.
While the administration is unlikely to reverse its new rules for NGOs in Syria, it can mitigate risks by strictly defining what constitutes “early recovery” and by explicitly prohibiting the use of property or other assets belonging to displaced Syrians or otherwise seized, expropriated, or confiscated by the regime for political purposes. Concurrently, the administration should impose sanctions against Syrian government officials and their associates engaged in the seizure of property or other assets of displaced Syrians.
Without peace, reconstruction only subsidizes the Assad regime.
David Adesnik is research director and a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), where Matthew Zweig is a senior fellow. They both contribute to FDD’s Center on Economic and Financial Power (CEFP). For more analysis from the authors and CEFP, please subscribe HERE. Follow David and Matthew on Twitter @adesnik and @MatthewZweig1. Follow FDD on Twitter @FDD and @FDD_CEFP. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
fdd.org · by David Adesnik Senior Fellow and Director of Research · December 9, 2021
6. The Decline of American Empire: A Kübler-Ross Cycle Analysis
Will we follow in Britain's footsteps?
Unusual and fascinating analysis here.
The Decline of American Empire: A Kübler-Ross Cycle Analysis
How will the United States react domestically should she be dislodged from her role of global top-dog power by China? As well as the obvious economic and strategic ramifications of an end to American imperium, there will be profound emotional and psychological effects on a society that has taken its hegemony for granted for more than three-quarters of a century.
The via dolorosa presently stretched before the United States will likely encompass the replacement of the dollar as the global currency of last resort, the recognition that the South China Seas are no longer navigable by the US Navy, the understanding that Africa has been effectively colonized by China, and the possible swallowing of Ukraine by Russia and Taiwan by China. If the United States maintains its present course, Americans should prepare themselves for a century of humiliating retreats. So, how are these developments likely to play out in an already deeply divided polity and society?
An analogy can be drawn with the British Empire, and the prolonged grieving process experienced by Britons in the three-and-a-half decades after India became independent in 1947. Within a generation and a half, the largest empire in the history of Mankind was reduced to struggling with Argentina over the Falkland Islands. Empires tend to rise and fall faster in modern than in ancient history, so what can Britain’s loss of Empire teach us about the possible decline and fall of America’s?
A useful means of understanding how Britons slowly accommodated themselves to their postwar loss of power and prestige is provided by the Kübler-Ross Grief Cycle—the five-stage process by which individuals deal with tragedy, bereavement, and a dawning knowledge of imminent demise. The British people’s journey through those five stages of grief has profound implications for America, assuming she continues down her chosen path of impotence and retreat.
The first stage of the Kübler-Ross Cycle is Denial, which was the initial response of the British government after the loss of the jewel in Britain’s imperial crown. Notwithstanding the ideological anti-imperialism of Clement Attlee’s Labour government, it insisted that India would remain part of the British Commonwealth (as it was still then designated) and attached to the Western anti-Communist bloc. Indeed, the whole concept of the Commonwealth—founded in December 1931 but not taken seriously until 1947—can be seen as a sop to a people in denial about the loss of Empire.
America is already in the Denial stage of appreciating the loss of power overseas. President Biden’s speeches and press conferences at the time of the coalition’s over-hasty and humiliating scuttle from Afghanistan betray a psychology symptomatic of the first stage of the Kübler-Ross cycle. “Last night in Kabul,” Biden announced in the White House State Dining Room on August 31st, “the United States ended 20 years of war in Afghanistan—the longest war in American history. We completed one of the biggest airlifts in history, with more than 120,000 people evacuated to safety. … No nation has ever done anything like it in all of history. Only the United States had the capacity and the will and the ability to do it, and we did it today.”
In fact, plenty of nations have the capacity, will, and ability to lose wars, but the United States had not done it since Vietnam. And as Biden’s speeches and actions have subsequently shown, his administration is in denial about the message that defeat at the hands of the Taliban sends to vacillating allies and jubilant antagonists alike.
Britain was shaken out of her Denial stage by the Suez Crisis of 1956, which arrived less than a decade after the loss of India. The second stage of the Kübler-Ross Cycle is Anger, and the fury that greeted Anthony Eden over his invasion of—and subsequent withdrawal from—the Canal Zone was symptomatic of a deeper anger about Britain’s dwindling position on the world stage. The role of the United States in forcing Britain’s humiliating retreat after a successful military operation further underlined the new world order, and sent a large number of Conservatives such as Enoch Powell into the barren cul-de-sac of lifelong anti-Americanism. The anger in British politics was also evident in the activities of the League of Empire Loyalists, which disrupted political meetings in the early 1960s. Its members were furious that after Suez and the independence of Sudan, the Conservatives no longer considered itself the party of Empire.
The capacity for anger in modern American politics hardly needs emphasising since the appalling scenes at the Capitol on January 6th, 2021. The mid-term elections in November 2022 may see at least some outpouring of anger over American loss of hegemony. It will be the first time that large sections of the American electorate have gone to the polls since the Afghan catastrophe. Anger with the Democrats will likely result in their loss of the House of Representatives and the relegation of Biden to lame-duckery.
Britain entered the third stage of the Kübler-Ross Cycle—Negotiation—in the 1960s when she made the rational choice to cleave to the United States; in Harold Macmillan’s revealing phrase, to try to become Greece to America’s Rome. His relationship with President Kennedy and support during the Cuban Missile Crisis were the foundations of a new post-Churchill Special Relationship. This was a logical response to the Suez debacle, and it could not even be weakened by Harold Wilson’s and Edward Heath’s refusal to be drawn into Vietnam.
It remains to be seen what the United States will do in her Negotiation stage. Certainly, she starts at a disadvantage because President Biden is not as good a diplomatic negotiator as President Xi of China or Russian President Putin, both of whom seem to outmanoeuvre him repeatedly. It is therefore doubtful that the United States can negotiate with her opponents and rivals successfully in an effort to defend a rules-based world order once she is eclipsed as the world’s pre-eminent superpower.
When Britain entered the Depression stage of Kübler-Ross in the 1970s, she did so with a total bipartisan commitment to national decline. She experienced depression in both its metaphysical and material senses. Economically and in prestige, she risked slipping into the third rank of world powers thanks to socialism and the pathos-laden Heathite Conservative response to it. In that doleful decade, Britain experienced the OPEC oil price trebling; IRA violence and internment in Northern Ireland; a miners’ strike that led to power cuts and a three-day week, stagflation, price and income caps; and trade union militancy that threatened the primacy of Parliament. The worst (because longest-lasting) of that decade’s developments came when Britain turned her back on the Commonwealth and joined the EEC in 1973. Only a country in the grip of severe depression, self-doubt, and historical amnesia could have done such a thing.
When the United States recognizes that it no longer matters in the world as it once did, that key allies are distancing themselves and flirting with China, that the global organizations erected by Bretton Woods and Dumbarton Oaks no longer guarantee her primacy, and that there is little she can do about it, then depression will hit America. It will leave her confused, morose, and liable to turn in on herself politically. It will be an ugly time.
In the 1980s, Britain embraced the fifth and final stage of the Cycle—Acceptance. This was almost entirely down to one person, Margaret Thatcher. The Falklands War seemed to arrest the lamentable drift and surrender since Suez, and the spectacular victory in the Cold War, in part due to her close alliance with Ronald Reagan, finally provided closure after the loss of Empire. Although she could never again be top-dog power, Britain’s replacement by her close ally was palatable because the Special Relationship had been shown to work well for both countries and also for the wider world in ridding the world of Soviet Communism.
For modern America, however, acceptance of decline cannot have any sense of closure because the successor-state is totalitarian. Every precept of National Socialist China is entirely antithetical to American values. Britain’s successor-state shared her language, common law, liberal principles, free market, and outlook. The United States can take no such comfort when peering into her post-imperial future. So, America’s final Acceptance stage is fraught with far greater dangers than the other four put together. The Free World really will have met its “time when the locusts feed.”
Is all this inevitable? Not if the United States can grasp the leadership of the West once more instead of wallowing in self-destructive and profoundly decadent obsessions with its own faults, real and imagined. The United States ought to heed the words of Winston Churchill during the Munich Debate of October 5th, 1938. The people, he said, should be told that “we have sustained a defeat without a war, the consequences of which will travel far with us along our road; they should know that we have passed an awful milestone in our history … And do not suppose that this is the end. This is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigour, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time.”
President Biden has already made it clear that he does not understand those words or appreciate their present importance. For now, Americans remain preoccupied with navel-gazing about Critical Race Theory and endlessly revisiting slavery 158 years after its abolition. Hopefully sometime before China takes Taiwan, Putin takes Ukraine, and Iran develops the Bomb, the United States will reject Acceptance of her eclipse and embrace her own supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigour.
7. If the United States pulls back, the world will become more dangerous
Other democracies must start preparing. But preparing for what? What will the international community look like if the US fails to lead?
I am not sure why the digital version of this article has a different title. I think the one that was used in print. I think that is a question we must answer.
This article appeared in the Leaders section of the print edition under the headline "What would America fight for?"
Excerpts:
More adaptation to a world with less Amer ica will be required. Democracies, especially in Europe, should spend more on defence. Those, such as Taiwan and Ukraine, at risk of being attacked should make themselves indigestible, for example by beefing up their capacity for asymmetric warfare. The better prepared they are, the less likely their foes are to attack them.
Fans of the rules-based order should share more intelligence with each other. They should bury old quarrels, such as the futile spats between Japan and South Korea over history. They should forge deeper and broader alliances, formally or informally. India, out of self-interest, should relinquish the vestiges of non-alignment and draw closer to the Quad, with Australia, Japan and America. NATO cannot admit Ukraine, since the rules say an attack on one is an attack on all, and Russia has already occupied Ukrainian territory. But NATO members can offer Ukraine more arms, cash and training to help it defend itself.
If the liberal order breaks down, America’s allies will suffer grievously. Once it is gone, Americans themselves may be surprised to discover how much they benefited from it. Yet all is not lost. A determined and united effort by democracies could preserve at least some of the rules-based system, and prevent the world from sliding back towards the dismal historical norm, in which the strong prey unchecked on the weak. Few tasks are more important, or harder.
If the United States pulls back, the world will become more dangerous
Other democracies must start preparing
Dec 11th 2021
EIGHTY YEARS ago Japan bombed Pearl Harbour. It was a grave error, bringing the world’s mightiest country into the war and dooming the Japanese empire to oblivion. A clear-sighted Japanese admiral supposedly lamented: “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.”
Today Japan is peaceable, rich and innovative. It was the Japanese who rebuilt their country, but their task was made easier by the superpower that defeated them. Not only was America midwife to a liberal, capitalist democracy in Japan; it also created a world order in which Japan was free to trade and grow. This order was not perfect, and did not apply everywhere. But it was better than anything that had come before.
Unlike previous great powers, America did not use its military dominance to win commercial advantage at the expense of its smaller allies. On the contrary, it allowed itself to be bound, most of the time, by common rules. And that rules-based system allowed much of the world to avoid war and grow prosperous.
Unfortunately, America is tiring of its role as guarantor of the liberal order. The giant has not exactly fallen asleep again, but its resolve is faltering and its enemies are testing it. Vladimir Putin is massing troops on the border with Ukraine and could soon invade. China is buzzing Taiwan’s airspace with fighter jets, using mock-ups of American aircraft-carriers for target practice and trying out hypersonic weapons. Iran has taken such a maximalist stance at nuclear talks that many observers expect them to collapse. Thus, two autocratic powers threaten to seize land currently under democratic control, and a third threatens to violate the Non-Proliferation Treaty by building a nuclear bomb. How far would America go to prevent such reckless acts?
Joe Biden can sound forceful, at times. On December 7th he warned Mr Putin of severe consequences if Russia were to launch another attack on Ukraine. He has maintained sanctions on Iran. And in October he said that America had a “commitment” to defend Taiwan, though aides insisted policy has not changed. (America has long refused to say whether it would send forces to repel a Chinese invasion, so as not to encourage any Taiwanese action that might provoke one.) China was left wondering whether Mr Biden misspoke or was craftily hinting at a more robust stance. On December 7th America’s House of Representatives passed a big boost to the defence budget. Also this week Mr Biden was to hold a “Summit for Democracy”, to encourage countries that respect the rules to club together.
And yet, as our Briefing explains, America has become reluctant to use hard power across much of the world. A coalition of hawks and doves in Washington is calling for “restraint”. The doves say that by attempting to police the world, America inevitably gets sucked into needless conflicts abroad that it cannot win. The hawks say that America must not be distracted from the only task that counts: standing up to China.
Either of these two visions would entail a partial, destabilising American retreat, leaving the world more dangerous and uncertain. Mr Biden’s debacle in withdrawing from Afghanistan led some to doubt America’s willingness to defend its friends or deter its foes, and many to worry about the competence of its planning. The president’s loose words about Amer ica’s nuclear umbrella have undermined faith among allies that it still protects them. And though Mr Biden does not insult allies as Donald Trump did, he often fails to consult them, eroding the bonds of trust that have long multiplied American power.
Just as important as the instincts of any one president is the mood of the country that elects them. America is no longer the confident hegemon of the 1990s. Its relative power has waned, even if it remains unmatched. After Iraq and Afghanistan, voters have grown weary of foreign adventures. Partisan politics, which once stopped at the water’s edge, paralyses most aspects of policy. Over 90 ambassadorial posts remain vacant, blocked by Congress. America has refused to join a trade pact that would have complemented its military ties in Asia with economic ones. The relentless drama of politics, including over such things as disputed elections and mask-wearing, makes America seem too divided at home to show sustained purpose abroad.
It would be a mistake to assume that the old, engaged America will come back—after all, Mr Trump may be re-elected in 2024. If the liberal order is to be preserved, other powers will have to do their bit, both to prepare for a world in which they have less help, but also to keep America engaged. There are some signs of this. Japan and Australia have signalled that they would help defend Taiwan. Britain has joined America in sharing nuclear-submarine propulsion technology with Australia. A new German government is hinting at a tougher line against Russia.
More adaptation to a world with less Amer ica will be required. Democracies, especially in Europe, should spend more on defence. Those, such as Taiwan and Ukraine, at risk of being attacked should make themselves indigestible, for example by beefing up their capacity for asymmetric warfare. The better prepared they are, the less likely their foes are to attack them.
Fans of the rules-based order should share more intelligence with each other. They should bury old quarrels, such as the futile spats between Japan and South Korea over history. They should forge deeper and broader alliances, formally or informally. India, out of self-interest, should relinquish the vestiges of non-alignment and draw closer to the Quad, with Australia, Japan and America. NATO cannot admit Ukraine, since the rules say an attack on one is an attack on all, and Russia has already occupied Ukrainian territory. But NATO members can offer Ukraine more arms, cash and training to help it defend itself.
If the liberal order breaks down, America’s allies will suffer grievously. Once it is gone, Americans themselves may be surprised to discover how much they benefited from it. Yet all is not lost. A determined and united effort by democracies could preserve at least some of the rules-based system, and prevent the world from sliding back towards the dismal historical norm, in which the strong prey unchecked on the weak. Few tasks are more important, or harder. ■
This article appeared in the Leaders section of the print edition under the headline "What would America fight for?"
8. A huge study of 20 years of global wealth demolishes the myth of 'trickle-down' and shows the rich are taking most of the gains for themselves
A huge study of 20 years of global wealth demolishes the myth of 'trickle-down' and shows the rich are taking most of the gains for themselves
The globe's richest people own far more wealth than the bottom half — including Elon Musk, the world's richest man.
Picture Alliance/Getty Images
- It's no secret there's inequality across the economy, but a huge new report shows just how much.
- The 2022 World Inequality Report demolishes the myth that tax cuts for the rich will trickle down.
- The bottom half of the global population holds just 2% of all wealth, while the top 10% earns 76%.
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Inequality has remained persistently high for decades, and a new report shows just how stark the divide is between the richest and poorest people on the planet.
The 2022 World Inequality Report, a huge undertaking coordinated by economic and inequality experts Lucas Chancel, Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman, was the product of four years of research and produced an unprecedented data set on just how wealth is distributed.
"The world is marked by a very high level of income inequality and an extreme level of wealth inequality," the authors wrote.
The data serves as a complete rebuke of the trickle-down economic theory, which posits that cutting taxes on the rich will "trickle down" to those below, with the cuts eventually benefiting everyone. In America, trickle-down was exemplified by President Ronald Reagan's tax slashes. It's a theory that persists today, even though most research has shown that 50 years of tax cuts benefits the wealthy and worsens inequality.
The researchers are some of the leading minds on inequality in the entire field of economics. Chancel is the co-director of the World Inequality Lab, while Saez and Zucman have literally written a book on the rich dodging taxes and helped create wealth tax proposals for senators like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.
Piketty, who was Zucman's doctoral adviser, wrote the tome "Capital in the 21st Century" which used an unprecedented data set going back to the French Revolution to expose how centuries of growing wealth inequality was a feature of capitalism, not a bug. The World Inequality Report was his effort to do the same for recent history.
They argue in the new report that the last two decades of wealth data show that "inequality is a political choice, not an inevitability."
For instance, when it comes to wealth, which accounts for the values of assets people hold, researchers found that the "poorest half of the global population barely owns any wealth at all." That bottom half owns just 2% of total wealth. That means that the top half of the world holds 98% of the world's wealth, and that gets even more concentrated the wealthier you get.
Indeed, the richest 10% of the world's population hold 76%, or two-thirds of all wealth. That means the 517 million people who make up the top hold vastly more than the 2.5 billion who make up the bottom. The world's policy choices have led to wealth trickling up rather than down.
One group in particular has seen its share of global wealth swell.
Billionaires now hold a 3% share of global wealth, up from 1% in 1995
The report notes that "2020 marked the steepest increase in global billionaires' share of wealth on record." Broadly, the number of billionaires rose to a record-number in 2020, with Wealth-X finding that there are now over 3,000 members of the three-comma club.
Billionaire gains are a well-documented trend: The left-leaning Institute for Policy Studies and Americans for Tax Fairness found that Americans added $2.1 trillion to their wealth during the pandemic, a 70% increase.
So what could work better than the current system? As the authors note, there's been a renewed interest in taxing wealth during the pandemic: "It would be completely unreasonable not to ask more to top wealth-holders in the future, especially in light of the social, developmental and environmental challenges ahead."
For the authors, that means expanding wealth taxes like property taxes to all different types of wealth, and to make taxes progressive — meaning they increase with net worth. The US has seen proposals from leading progressives like Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Sen. Ron Wyden that would respectively tax billionaire wealth outright, or tax the gains their assets see. But neither is moving forward.
9. Keep It Separate: Why America Wants a Marine Corps
I am for keeping the Corps.
Excerpts:
Finally, the theme underwriting all these critiques is that an organization is more than its line-and-block chart would suggest, and units are not truly interchangeable. Service culture matters, as this bleeds into doctrine, tactics, standards, and ultimately into the capabilities of one unit versus another. To absorb the Marine Corps into another service would ultimately rob the organization of the culture that makes it so much more valuable and effective than the sum of its parts—and, consequently, something uniquely effective and capable. Marines are different, in the best way possible. Americans knows this—and that is why they want a Marine Corps.
Keep It Separate: Why America Wants a Marine Corps
The Marine Corps of today is not the one of the 1950s. Revisiting an argument from that era to abolish the service is more of an intellectual exercise than a relevant one.
By Major Brian Kerg, U.S. Marine Corps
December 2021 Proceedings Vol. 147/12/1426
The recent article by retired Commander Norman Denny, “How to Absorb the Marine Corps into the Army and Navy,” offered new life to an old discussion within U.S. national security circles: Does America need a Marine Corps? Denny answers in the negative, arguing that the Army, Navy, and Air Force are capable of performing the Marine Corps’ missions, and proposes ways to execute this absorption.
First, the naval community must tip its hat to Commander Denny for his willingness to recommend a proposal he certainly knew would result in significant push back. This conversation is often rife with emotion and parochialism, and it is rare to see clear-eyed arguments made about this subject. Offering such a heterodox yet structured argument, his article embodies the U.S. Naval Institute’s mission of daring to read, think, speak, and write.
That said, Denny’s arguments don’t make the case. He overestimates the capabilities of the other services to take on the Marine Corps’ missions, underestimates the massive structural challenges inherent in his proposal, does not account for the ever-adapting nature of the Marine Corps as a service, and does not appreciate the unique synergy of the service as a fighting force.
Commander Denny frames much of his argument around the dialogue occurring after World War II and the Korean War. While important, this ignores the changes that have occurred over the ensuing seven decades. Denny claims that the Army can assume amphibious assault responsibilities because it performed this role at Normandy. The Army did indeed conduct a number of impressive amphibious operations across the European Theater of Operations in World War II, Normandy being just one of them. But the Army was capable of doing this because the units involved in those operations were manned, trained, and equipped for the task, and they worked closely with the Navy toward this aim. The Army is not capable of doing those tasks today and putting this role on the Army would require significant additional structural changes to both the Army and the Navy. For example, Marine Corps acquisitions integrate the considerations of the L-Class ships from which that equipment might have to be projected. How much Army equipment currently meets this bar?
Regarding Marine aviation, Commander Denny claims the Navy and Air Force are fully capable of providing close-air support, but uses as his citation an article showcasing a Navy F/A-18 shooting down a Syrian Su-22 fighter-bomber. This air-to-air combat role is functionally and completely different from the role of close air support (CAS). While other services possess aircraft that can perform close-air support, doing this also requires integration of those pilots and their aircraft into aviation command-and-control systems for their employment in the CAS role. What makes Marine Corps aviation so effective in providing CAS is that the aircraft fall under the command-and-control of a Marine commander common to the ground forces—that is, the aviation is organic to the Marine Corps unit. For this level of effectiveness of CAS to hold under Denny’s proposal, the aviation belonging to the ground forces (in this case, now an Army unit) would also have to be organic to the Army commander common to both the ground forces and the air forces. Such an arrangement would require significant additional structural changes to the Army and/or the Navy to pull off. It would also require Army fixed-wing pilots, or the assignment of Navy fixed-wing pilots to the Army. Both options are rife with additional challenges requiring myriad structural changes.
Regarding what the nation wants, Commander Denny suggests the Marine Corps will demand the status quo. This contention seems to completely bypass every discussion on Marine Corps force design that has dominated Marine Corps professional discourse since General David H. Berger became the commandant. The 38th Commandant’s Planning Guidance, Force Design 2030, Talent Management 2030, and a Concept for Stand-In Forces are fundamentally about radically changing the status quo to better pursue naval integration. The Commandant himself has published numerous articles in Proceedings and elsewhere advocating for these changes, while many other naval professionals have further discussed and fiercely debated these changes. The bottom line is that the Marine Corps is probably the last service that will demand the status quo from Congress. As it has historically demonstrated, the Marine Corps will instead continue to be a chameleon and change to fit the needs of the nation.
Later, Denny suggests that incorporating the Marine Corps into the Army would “eliminate the need for the Commandant to go to the Army and beg for future armor and artillery support.” In the context of a joint operation, if Marine Corps forces needed additional armor or artillery support, this would be requested from the commander of those Marine Corps forces through the joint task force commander, and not the Commandant, who has no role in the command-and-control of combat forces. Further, this comment does not seem to appreciate the “why” behind the divestment of armor and the replacement of tube artillery for rocket artillery—to support force-design efforts for naval integration and allow Marines to serve as an extension of the fleet, a task for which armor is poorly suited.
Finally, the theme underwriting all these critiques is that an organization is more than its line-and-block chart would suggest, and units are not truly interchangeable. Service culture matters, as this bleeds into doctrine, tactics, standards, and ultimately into the capabilities of one unit versus another. To absorb the Marine Corps into another service would ultimately rob the organization of the culture that makes it so much more valuable and effective than the sum of its parts—and, consequently, something uniquely effective and capable. Marines are different, in the best way possible. Americans knows this—and that is why they want a Marine Corps.
10. Biden Acknowledges US Democratic Vulnerabilities at Summit Opening
Excerpts:
While the summit does not specifically mention China or Russia, it is widely seen as the Biden administration’s effort to mobilize support against what it sees as increasing authoritarian influence from both leaders Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin.
Beijing has countered with its own hastily arranged summit called the "International Forum on Democracy: The Shared Human Values" in early December, with topics including "pluralistic origins of democracy" and "China's view of democracy."
Biden Acknowledges US Democratic Vulnerabilities at Summit Opening
December 09, 2021 11:00 AM
UPDATE December 09, 2021 8:03 PM
WHITE HOUSE —
U.S. President Joe Biden acknowledged his own country’s vulnerabilities as he hosted a virtual Summit for Democracy that brings together world leaders, civil society and the private sector to "set forth an affirmative agenda for democratic renewal and to tackle the greatest threats faced by democracies today through collective action."
"In the face of sustained and alarming challenges to democracy, universal human rights and all around the world, democracy needs champions,” Biden said Thursday during his opening remarks at the start of the two-day event. “And I wanted to host this summit because here in the United States, we know as well as anyone that renewing our democracy and strengthening our democratic institutions requires constant effort."
For the first time, the U.S. was labeled a "backsliding democracy" in a 2021 report released in November by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, mainly because of a challenge to the 2020 elections results, which culminated in the storming of the U.S. Capitol building on January 6 by supporters of former president Donald Trump.
Biden did not mention the former president nor the insurrection attempt but said that American democracy is an ongoing struggle "to live up to our highest ideals and to heal our divisions and recommit ourselves to the founding idea of our nation captured in our Declaration of Independence."
The Biden team is approaching the summit with a "lot of humility," recognizing that the U.S. has its own problems they need to work on, said Steven Feldstein, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "I think that's a really important tone they are setting."
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Initiative for Democratic Renewal
The initiatives include funds to support independent media; back anti-corruption efforts; empower reformers, labor unions and marginalized groups; advance technology that supports democracy; and defend free and fair elections.
Leaders are encouraged to announce pledges in line with the summit's pillars of strengthening democracy, defending against authoritarianism, addressing corruption and promoting human rights, but the pledges will not be legally binding. The summit is not expected to result in a communique or any kind of joint declaration.
"We see the summit as really a launch of the work that's to come, and so we didn't want to get ahead of ourselves," said a senior administration official in a briefing to reporters.
Still, human rights observers applaud the fact that the summit is being held.
"Labor rights is one area where the administration has begun to translate its strong domestic position in support of worker organizing to increased support for labor rights around the world," said Marti Flacks, director and senior fellow of the Human Rights Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
The summit is part of Biden's campaign pledge to strengthen democracy around the world at a time when autocratic governments are on the rise – a point the president made in his speech.
"They seek to advance their own power, export and expand their influence around the world and justify the repressive policies and practices as a more efficient way to address today's challenges," Biden said.
Notably, 2020 marks the 15th consecutive year of global freedom and retreat, according to a recent report by the policy research group Freedom House.
"As a lethal pandemic, economic and physical insecurity, and violent conflict ravaged the world in 2020, democracy’s defenders sustained heavy new losses in their struggle against authoritarian foes, shifting the international balance in favor of tyranny," the report said.
Christopher Walker, vice president for studies and analysis at the National Endowment for Democracy, said now is the time to bolster global democratic renewal. "It’s more important than ever under tougher conditions to fortify and defend democracy when it’s under such clear duress."
Not everyone invited came
More than 100 countries are attending the summit, including liberal democracies, weaker democracies and even several states with authoritarian characteristics.
Summit for Democracy
On Wednesday, a day before the summit, a senior Pakistani official, who declined to speak on the record, confirmed to VOA that Islamabad will not be attending. The official said Pakistan "firmly" supports a "One-China Policy" and Taiwan’s participation at the democracy summit is not in line with Islamabad’s long-standing stance.
Islamabad’s decision to back out is unsurprising and is motivated by its own political calculations, said Michael Kugelman, senior associate for South Asia at the Wilson Center. With the backdrop of an economic crisis and other domestic woes, the decision to snub the event would play well in a county with high anti-American sentiments.
"There's unhappiness in Islamabad that Biden has not been willing to have a phone call with Prime Minister (Imran) Khan," Kugelman said. "By backing out of this democracy summit, the Pakistani government can derive some political benefits and conclude that it has nothing to lose by not participating."
While the summit does not specifically mention China or Russia, it is widely seen as the Biden administration’s effort to mobilize support against what it sees as increasing authoritarian influence from both leaders Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin.
Beijing has countered with its own hastily arranged summit called the "International Forum on Democracy: The Shared Human Values" in early December, with topics including "pluralistic origins of democracy" and "China's view of democracy."
This week the U.S. announced a diplomatic boycott of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, citing China's human rights "atrocities." Australia, Canada, and the UK have joined the boycott, which Beijing calls a "smear campaign" and "political posturing."
VOA's Ayaz Gul and Lin Yang contributed to this story.
11. The Humanities May Be Declining at Universities — But They’re Thriving on Zoom
Who is the Socrates of Zoom?
Can we replicate Plato's Cave on Zoom?
The Humanities May Be Declining at Universities — But They’re Thriving on Zoom - EdSurge News
The stranger keeps his secrets close. When he arrives at the Phaeacian court, he finds hosts that are generous—and curious about his identity. The king wonders if he's a god. The queen inquires where he found his fine clothes. And when he declines to compete in athletic games, a brash courtier accuses him of being a mere merchant.
This is where four readers find Odysseus when they gather on a Zoom call on a Wednesday afternoon. During two intense hours, three adult students and an instructor read aloud from the “Odyssey.” They analyze its weaving imagery. They discuss differences in their translations about a bard described in Greek as “good,” “trusty” or “faithful.” They marvel at how Odysseus “just cries all the time,” as one student puts it, weeping for seven years on Calypso’s island, longing to return to his wife, his lands and his high-roofed house.
The stranger is prone to emotion. When he hears the faithful Phaeacian bard sing the famous deeds of fighting heroes, he hides his face and weeps. The king sees, but he distracts everyone else by summoning them to games and contests.
“He gets them outside,” one student says. “That’s a classic male thing—let’s play sports.”
“Or,” the instructor counters, “it’s a healthy response to a guest who seems emotionally laden.”
The bard sings again, about the grimmest fight the hero Odysseus ever braved. The stranger melts into tears. This time, the king addresses his magnificent guest: “Don’t be crafty now, my friend, don’t hide the truth I’m after. Fair is fair, speak out! Come, tell us the name they call you there at home.”
It’s the moment, the instructor says, when “you get at what’s at stake.”
The moment the hero is asked: “Who are you?”
The moment, a student offers, when the story truly begins.
Throughout the pandemic, versions of this close-reading conversation have taken place week after week. Organized through new nonprofits and small startups including the Catherine Project, Night School Bar and Premise, they bring together adults who want to spend their free time talking to strangers about literature and philosophy.
It sounds at first like an ambitious book club—except for the fact that many of these seminars are organized and led by college professors, some so eager to participate that they do it for free.
“Mostly it’s a way for them to do a kind of teaching they can’t do at their regular jobs,” explains Zena Hitz, founder of the Catherine Project and a tutor (faculty member) at St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland.
Rather than simply a pastime for bookworms, or a profit-driven attempt to “disrupt” the higher education market with some new kind of credential, these seminars serve to critique the modern university. Leading the protest are scholars disillusioned by academia’s pressures and priorities. Although some of their seminars are intended as what Hitz calls a “friendly supplement” to college curricula, others are more openly antagonistic. One six-week course hosted by Night School Bar is even called “Smash the University.”
Concerns that have plagued other new online education operations—how to grade student work at scale, how to link learning with college credit—are the very questions that leaders of these programs reject. Instead, they ask what relevance grades, credit or credentials could possibly have to Greek mythology or feminist philosophy. And they raise new questions, about who should read those works, and how and why.
“A lot of people feel like they don’t have access to a place to share critical thought. Their daily lives and jobs don’t incorporate that,” says Lindsey Andrews, founder and director of Night School Bar, which is based in Durham, North Carolina. “People like to read, they want to talk about books, and they want meaningful relationships with other people. I think the arts and humanities gives us a site for doing all of those things.”
With fewer and fewer undergraduates studying English, history and philosophy in college, the site for such conversations may be shifting away from campus. Yet the rise of Zoom seminars pokes holes in predictions that these disciplines are in decline.
Maybe the humanities will be just fine. But what about the universities they leave behind?
‘A Mini World-Making’
No credits, no degrees—come and study fundamental questions, reading classic books.
— Zena Hitz
A few months into the pandemic, Hitz was receiving notes from readers of her new book, “Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life,” seeking advice about how to read and study. She had fresh experience teaching college students remotely and a new appreciation for how video calls could connect small groups of people. These encounters revived the professor’s desire to create a community where readers teach themselves and each other.
“I wanted for years to have some type of education that was available to everybody, that was high quality, that had no strings attached,” Hitz says. “No credits, no degrees—come and study fundamental questions, reading classic books.”
So she started using her Twitter account to organize informal groups of people who wanted to read significant books together. By August 2020, Hitz christened the effort the Catherine Project, named for Catherine of Alexandria, patron saint of philosophers, and Catherine Doherty, a social worker who founded a Catholic community where Hitz lived for a few years. Hitz kept posting and attracting readers; an offer to read Kierkegaard on Saturday nights drew interest from dozens. This fall, 138 people are studying in 18 courses. Seminars are free, and instructors volunteer.
“Learning is something freely received, freely given,” Hitz says. “We’re trying to hold that up. It’s something the education world needs to keep in mind.”
Night School Bar also started on Twitter. Andrews, an adjunct professor who teaches literature at North Carolina State University, was distressed by the pandemic. She knew that other people felt confused and isolated, too. So in May 2020, she posted an offer to teach a free, six-week seminar about art and illness for a few dozen people, drawing on works by Vincent van Gogh, Virginia Woolf, Ralph Ellison and Emily Dickinson, among others.
Thirty people signed up, from all over the world. They stuck with her for six weeks.
“It was the most meaningful teaching experience I’ve ever had,” Andrews says.
People asked for more.
Prior to the pandemic, Andrews had considered opening a bar with a classroom in it, and she already owned the internet domain nightschoolbar.com. She repurposed the website and name and used them to organize a few more virtual courses with fellow literature scholar Annu Dahiya. In the past year and a half, Night School Bar has taught 750 people through 60 courses, funded by student donations that go to support instructors (currently paid about $1,200 per course). Some teachers are former Night School Bar students, others were actively recruited, and still others signed up after hearing about the mission, Andrews says: “The humanities are for everybody.”
It was the most meaningful teaching experience I’ve ever had.
— Lindsey Andrews
Another effort, Premise, grew out of founder Mary Finn’s experiences teaching in high schools and running in-person seminar programs for adults in San Francisco and Portland, Oregon. She spent a year developing her idea for virtual seminars as “a smooth, frictionless way” for people to get together and talk. The classes Premise has hosted since May of this year—about illness and pain, feminist power and the pandemic—have attracted students from across the country, some paying the $35 course fee, others signing up with a free trial code.
Finn sees civic value in inviting adults who may disagree into constructive conversation around new ideas. “We make our world by how we act and what we think and what we talk about,” she says. “The Premise class is a mini world-making.”
These three virtual seminar programs draw from different libraries. The Catherine Project, influenced by the Great Books curriculum of St. John’s College, teaches works including ancient Greek classics, Russian novels and German poetry. Night School Bar often tackles texts on queer theory, anti-racism and feminism. Premise arranges its courses around “enduring questions” informed by books and films both classical and modern that have some substance to them. As Finn puts it, “I want people to feel they’ve eaten a healthy meal, not a junk food snack.”
What they share is an approach to learning that favors big ideas, small groups, close reading and expert facilitation. They are less like other digital offerings that inform and entertain while you sit on your couch—think MasterClass—and more like the kind of spiritual study some religious communities practice, which invites readers as moral agents to make meaning from sacred texts. “Without the dogma,” Finn clarifies.
Talking so earnestly about books might feel a little corny. A little luxurious. Even a little subversive.
“The arts and humanities,” Andrews says, “allow us to question what we take as given knowledge.”
Adult Education
The outcomes of our actions may matter less than doing the right thing for the right reasons.
When Scott Samuelson taught this concept from Kant’s moral philosophy one day at Kirkwood Community College in Iowa, a middle-aged woman approached him after class. She asked, “Is that true?”
The philosophy professor asked the student what she thought. She shared a story. She once had allowed doctors to perform a risky surgery on her child—who then died.
“For her, this was not an abstract question of moral philosophy. This was a living, burning question for her as a human being,” Samuelson says. “Having a forum to struggle with it was dignifying, in a way. It dealt with something that wouldn’t have been dealt with in her life.”
This is not the kind of schooling usually conjured by the phrase “adult education.” That more commonly refers to extremely practical instruction, such as basic skills classes in literacy and math, or technical training intended to “reskill” or “upskill” workers for “the jobs of the future.” Many adult education programs at the college level also take a pragmatic approach, with newer online options designed to be fast, flexible and convenient, not to mention modular and smartphone-friendly.
It’s as if contemplation is for adolescents only—no grown-ups allowed. But adults don’t only seek education for financial gain. They don’t all want to speed through coursework. And the lives they’ve led—raising children, fighting in wars, surviving cancer—may make them even better suited than youth to the deep study of philosophical questions, even if opportunities for that can be hard for them to find.
That longing for exploration has nothing to do with academia, has nothing to do with schooling.
— Roosevelt Montás
“That longing for exploration has nothing to do with academia, has nothing to do with schooling,” says Roosevelt Montás, Columbia University senior lecturer and author of the new book “Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation.” “That hunger and that interest doesn’t go away as you get older,” he adds. “In some cases, the settling of your life creates room for those questions to become more meaningful to you.”
Adult students helped to inspire Samuelson’s own book, “The Deepest Human Life: An Introduction to Philosophy for Everyone.” And the prospect of teaching more adults who are simply interested in learning—with no grading required—prompted him to volunteer for the Catherine Project, where he’s now teaching Dante’s “Divine Comedy.”
“It’s been kind of energizing,” Samuelson says. Teaching adults “adds tremendous depth to the conversation, and it’s instructive to me as well to see them not just as academic exercises, but living, real questions.”
Yet assumptions about who college and classic books are meant for—the young, the elite—may leave adults who don’t have advanced credentials bearing their years of experience as a burden, not a gift.
That’s what Chad Wellmon, a professor of German studies and co-author of new book “Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age,” found out when he taught through the University of Virginia’s Edge program, which offers liberal-arts courses to working adults. Several of his students lamented that they’d tried college before, but “life got in the way.” The first week of class was an “unmitigated disaster,” Wellmon says, with some students feeling overwhelmed or ashamed about finally approaching significant texts—“this thing they had failed to do for the past 50 years.”
“Reading Aristotle in that context was part of that felt indignity of not having a B.A.,” he adds.
So Wellmon threw out his syllabus. He tried to reframe students’ concerns about what they thought they lacked. And ultimately, the class “read all over the place.”
“It was incredible,” Wellmon says. Students thought so too—some remarking, “‘I never thought I could read philosophy.’”
Some people who participate in the Catherine Project, Night School Bar and Premise have already studied literature, art, history or philosophy. But others have not. It’s those folks—some of them people like Wellmon’s students—who most interest Finn, founder of Premise. She wants Premise classes to be intergenerational opportunities for people who don’t usually think of themselves as readers, thinkers or students to try those identities on, and to have their ideas taken seriously.
“If classes are only filled with people who know they like talking about text-based big ideas, that’s not what’s most valuable to me,” Finn says. “I want people there who don’t know they need it yet.”
Beyond Academia
Are not some pleasures false and others true?
Socrates asks this in a dialogue from the fourth century B.C. A graduate student asks it in a Zoom seminar in the 21st century A.D.
The topic is Plato’s “Philebus.” Conversation is halting. There are long stretches of silence. Someone tugs a thread—is there a difference between a true pleasure and a real pleasure?—and then someone else grabs hold of it, stretches it, balls it up, smooths it out.
For two hours, people calling in from England, Central America and the U.S. carefully tease knots out of the tightly wound manuscript, using its fibers to braid their own ideas. It’s hard to say which participant does “best” or gets the text “right.” And since there are no points to earn or tests to pass, that doesn’t matter.
“Learning is not a set of standards you have to meet,” says Hitz, the Catherine Project’s founder. “Learning is starting from wherever you are and moving to some place better.”
It’s a different dynamic than in college classrooms where some of the seminar facilitators also teach. In those spaces, they say, pressure to perform and compete can stifle discussion. As Andrews of Night School Bar puts it: “I find students are afraid to have creative or meaningful ideas because they are afraid to be wrong.”
Setting aside the distraction of assessment appeals to instructors.
“It’s very liberating to be able to give feedback to people without any sense of—that’s an 87,” Samuelson says. “It allows for there to be meaningful conversation and growth and feedback without the awkwardness of feeling somehow ranked.”
Disentangling discourse from grades is also a way to free it from universities. That’s not accidental. Some seminar organizers view their experiments not just as alternatives to academia, but as antidotes.
They worry not only that higher education limits who can access the humanities, but that institutions may also diminish those disciplines, even abuse them, by severing them from what Wellmon calls “intellectual desire” and contorting them to answer questions they were not meant to satisfy—about job skills and starting salaries and career tracks. It’s common for universities to tout data about how liberal arts degrees are valuable for long-term earnings and highlight the ways literature, philosophy, history and the arts teach “soft skills” sought after by employers.
But students staring down decades of tuition debt don't always seem convinced by this rhetoric. The number of graduates majoring in the humanities fell for the eighth straight year in 2020, while enrollments in business, engineering and health care are on the rise.
“People are paying a lot of money in tuition costs, hoping to use it to get a job, and they are very scared to step outside of the direct path to their job,” Andrews says.
Night School Bar is not shy about critiquing all this. “We believe education should enrich you, not exploit you,” its website proclaims. Its “Smash the University” course description doubles as a manifesto about the ills of higher education. It asks, “how and where can we study today?”
It’s not only possible to study outside of academia—it may be impossible to study within it.
The implication is that it’s not only possible to study outside of academia—it may be impossible to study within it. And if the university has grown inhospitable to the humanities, perhaps scholars can smuggle them out, book by book, one affordable seminar at a time.
Maybe the humanities can find shelter elsewhere. Some day, Hitz says, the Catherine Project might find a physical home. She envisions it as a reading library with a collection “more serious” than the books at a public library but less specialized than those at a research library. It could employ faculty. They could teach reading groups.
“To me,” Hitz says, “that feels so exciting and perfect.”
Growing Differently
For now, the seminar startups are expanding online. They’re winning grants and raising money. They’re recruiting more students and new teachers, emigrants from academia who are taking a part of the university, as Richard Wright wrote:
to transplant in alien soil, to see if it could grow differently, if it could drink of new and cool rains, bend in strange winds, respond to the warmth of other suns, and perhaps, to bloom.
Freed from so much anxiety about grades, credentials, status, debt and jobs, what might the humanities cultivate?
Hitz sees a method for developing habits of mind. Finn sees a salve for loneliness and polarization. Andrews sees “a source of real sustenance for people,” she says. “Art and literature can make your life meaningful.”
Yet even the power of books to make meaning might be too grandiose a goal, says Wellmon. That sort of expectation has “overburdened the humanities,” he argues—and perhaps excused other disciplines, like the sciences, from taking more responsibility.
One of the tragedies of the university is: It is insufficient to be honest about why we really want to do something.
— Chad Wellmon
“One of the tragedies of the university is: It is insufficient to be honest about why we really want to do something. I just want to read Kafka with some folks and make sense of it. Now we have to say, ‘Reading Kafka will fortify democracy, it will arrest disinformation,’” Wellmon says. “I don’t make people better people. I don’t make them democratic citizens.”
What Wellmon believes he does do is teach people how to read. And many of his adult students “wanted to be the type of person who valued reading for reading’s sake,” he says—who reads Great Books because they’re great books.
As for why Wellmon reads? His reply is quick: “I love it.”
He sinks into a long silence.
Then he answers again: “So many reasons. Sometimes I open a book, and I can’t read fast enough. Something might happen at the end of the sentence. Something I hadn’t seen before. A little piece of gold. A little flower. And then I get to tell my wife about it if I don’t teach that day. I get to share it. I get to write about it,” he says. “Books are those things, those objects, that for whatever reason have always been the way that I just do life.”
As the “Odyssey” discussion concludes for the afternoon, three students describe the journeys they took to the seminar on Homer’s epics. The course offers an experience that one student treasured from his days at St. John’s College, and that another felt he had missed while attending a big state school.
“This sense of self-driven learning for its own sake was appealing to me,” the second student says.
The third student signed up to fulfill his longtime goal of reading Homer. He had tried to read the “Iliad” on his own, three times, but “either life took over, or I got numb to the bloodshed,” he says.
Then he heard about the Catherine Project. “It’s either now or never,” he thought. “Do this in a group, or I’m never going to get through it.”
It worked.
“I’m 60, and it may have been decades later,” he says, “but I’ve actually read the ‘Iliad.’”
12. Spies and Starbucks Cards: The Unlikely Link Between Espionage and Food
Starbucks, a tool of tradcraft.
Excerpts:
In the 21st century, spies are more likely to pop into fast food spots to conduct business. They’re open late, they’re easily identifiable, and they’re pretty anonymous, making them ideal spaces to plot and plan. In that same 2019 interview, Fox recalled a CIA instructor who taught agents how to communicate via Starbucks gift cards: "He gives one [gift card] to each of his assets and tells them, 'If you need to see me, buy a coffee.' Then he checks the card numbers on a cybercafé computer each day, and if the balance on one is depleted, he knows he's got a meeting. Saves him having to drive past a whole slew of different physical signal sites each day [to check for chalk marks and lowered window blinds]. And the card numbers aren't tied to identities, so the whole thing is pretty secure."
Spies and Starbucks Cards: The Unlikely Link Between Espionage and Food
Vice · by Jelisa Castrodale
Over the past century or so, spies across the globe have parlayed our innate fascination with food into something beyond a satisfying supper. For members of the international intelligence community, food has a variety of uses: It can be a weapon, a way of passing on messages, and a means of blending into the crowd.
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That’s not to say that food is a foolproof way of evading detection. In September 1940, German spy Karl Heinrich Meier arrived in the coastal English village of Lydd, having snuck across the Channel aboard a fishing trawler the night before. Attempting to blend in with his new surroundings, Meier ordered a pint of cider at ten in the morning, either forgetting or being completely unaware of the fact that British licensing laws at the time prohibited the sale of alcohol before midday. He was arrested, tried, and eventually hanged at London’s HMP Pentonville in December that year.
Meier wasn’t the only German spy to fall foul of British culinary traditions that year. Another agent was rumbled after bratwurst – a distinctly German sausage – was found in his bag. Both spies were part of Operation Lena, a German intelligence gathering plot.
The Second World War was a terrible time to attempt subterfuge if you were unable to disguise your food preferences. British spies sent into Mediterranean countries risked making their presence all too apparent through their distinctly bland eating habits. According to historian and author Peter Taylor, this compelled MI6 to consider producing chocolate bars laced with garlic, in an attempt to smell like the locals. It didn’t get past the prototype stage, but the point remains: Adapt to the culinary customs of the country you’re operating in, and you’ll save yourself some grief.
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Spies have long made good use of restaurants, too. Over time, certain eateries have acquired an indelible aura of secrecy around them, making them perfect places for spies to settle down for a long lunch.
“Restaurants and cafés are vital for espionage,” said former CIA operative Amaryllis Fox in an interview for NPR in 2019. “They give you a place to meet the people you’re looking for. Sometimes, these meetings are accidental, but most of the time they’re just contrived to look like an accident.”
Ben Makuch
04.30.20
Moscow restaurant Aragavi opened in 1938 and served up Georgian food to a clientele that included actors and chess grandmasters as well as KGB officers. So beloved was Aragavi by Russia’s shadowy state forces that it was rumoured that Lavrentiy Beria, the head of Stalin’s secret police, designed the restaurant himself. Even Kim Philby, one of the most famous spies of the 20th century, was an Aragavi regular in the years after he defected to the USSR at the height of the Cold War.
In the 21st century, spies are more likely to pop into fast food spots to conduct business. They’re open late, they’re easily identifiable, and they’re pretty anonymous, making them ideal spaces to plot and plan. In that same 2019 interview, Fox recalled a CIA instructor who taught agents how to communicate via Starbucks gift cards: "He gives one [gift card] to each of his assets and tells them, 'If you need to see me, buy a coffee.' Then he checks the card numbers on a cybercafé computer each day, and if the balance on one is depleted, he knows he's got a meeting. Saves him having to drive past a whole slew of different physical signal sites each day [to check for chalk marks and lowered window blinds]. And the card numbers aren't tied to identities, so the whole thing is pretty secure."
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One of the stranger espionage stories of recent years involves the FBI, a peanut butter sandwich and a 42-year-old nuclear engineer named Jonathan Toebbe. Earlier this year, Toebbe found himself in an American court, accused of sharing and selling secrets about US nuclear submarine plans with someone he believed was a representative of a foreign government.
Alex Norcia
01.18.19
The person in question turned out to be an FBI employee, who planned to bust Toebbe. After a lot of negotiation, Toebbe arranged an initial delivery of files in exchange for $10,000 in cryptocurrency. He proceeded to slide a 16GB memory card into a peanut butter sandwich, according to legal documents obtained by the Associated Press.
Further transactions took place, with Toebbe stuffing his information into a packet of chewing gum at one point. He was arrested on the 9th of October this year, charged with treason, and now awaits trial in prison.
On a lighter note, let us consider the fact that without food-loving spies, those of us who live in the northern hemisphere wouldn’t be able to pop to the supermarket for a punnet of strawberries whenever the mood strikes. The fruit we eat today are descended from plants brought back from Chile by Amédée François Frézie — a spy sent there by the French royals at the turn of the 18th century. His mission was to study defence fortifications – not local flora – but he was distracted by the fragrant fruit instead. France’s spying loss is our culinary gain.
Vice · by Jelisa Castrodale
13. Why Russia won’t likely invade Ukraine
Sun Tzu: "Never assume the enemy will not attack. Make yourself invincible."
Why Russia won’t likely invade Ukraine
Despite a troop build-up on the border signs are US and Russia are moving towards a deal rather than a conflict over Ukraine
Russia and the United States are making deals about Ukraine behind Kiev’s back.
The two rival powers see the Eastern European country merely as a political object, and in the near future they could strike a wider arrangement about eastern Ukraine’s coal-rich Donbass region. The contours of a potential agreement are slowly coming into view.
After this week’s “virtual summit” between Russian President Vladimir Putin and his American counterpart Joe Biden, the Kremlin signaled that it could welcome the involvement of the United States in the Normandy Format – a platform for negotiations on a peaceful settlement of the Donbass conflict.
The Normandy Format talks involve representatives of four countries: Germany, Russia, Ukraine and France. Indeed, the potential involvement of the US – Ukraine’s top backer – could boost chances for the implementation of the Minsk Agreement, signed in the Belarusian capital in 2015.
The deal effectively ended offensive military operations in the Donbass but positional warfare is still ongoing.
The Kremlin claims that Kiev has deployed as many as 125,000 troops to the region, in an alleged attempt to recapture territory now under control of the Russia-backed self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic and Lugansk People’s Republic.
At this point, Moscow seems determined to protect its proxies in the event of a potential Ukrainian offensive.
“Any provocations by the Ukrainian authorities to settle the Donbass difficulties militarily will be thwarted,” said the Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces General Valery Gerasimov.
His statement was a clear warning to Ukraine and the West that Russia is ready to intervene in case Kiev launches a large-scale military campaign against Russia-backed forces.
Ukrainian servicemen gather near an armored personnel carrier stationed along the front line during confrontations with Russia-backed separatists near the small town of Volnovakha, Donetsk region, on June 23, 2021. Photo: AFP / Anatolii Stepanov
The West and Ukraine, on the other hand, warn that Russia has mounted its military numbers near the Ukrainian border to 120,000, including the deployment of army, air force and naval troops. Rumors are flying that Russia could invade Ukraine as early as January or February, although Gerasimov denies any such plans.
From the Kremlin’s perspective, Russia achieved most of its political and military goals in 2014 after Moscow annexed Crimea, a territory with huge offshore gas and oil reserves.
Soon after the controversial referendum on the status of Crimea, the self-proclaimed coal-rich Donbass republics declared independence from Ukraine. But the Kremlin still refuses to recognize those entities, even though their economies have been de facto integrated into Russia.
Thus, it is still questionable if Moscow is interested in another land grab. In 2014 Russia could have seized not just Crimea and the Donbass but also all other Russian-speaking regions of Ukraine, from Kharkov in the east to Odessa in the south.
At the time, following the Euromaidan regime change in Kiev, Ukrainian Armed Forces were on the brink of collapse, but Russia did not use the opportunity to establish control over the entire southeastern part of Ukraine.
It is therefore improbable that Moscow will try to do it in 2021 or 2022. Russian policymakers are well aware that the Ukrainian Army has been modernized and equipped with sophisticated US-made Javelin anti-tank guided missiles and Turkish-produced Bayraktar drones.
More importantly, it is very dubious if Russia, amid global economic and energy crises, is ready to occupy more Ukrainian territory and “feed” millions of perceived as disloyal Ukrainian citizens.
It is far more likely that Moscow and Washington will continue to negotiate the future of Ukraine, although both sides will keep flexing muscles as part of new Cold War military diplomacy.
On December 8, Putin said that it would be “criminal inaction” for Russia to stand by and let NATO move into Ukraine, raising fears in the West of a “major war” in Eastern Europe.
Still, despite harsh rhetoric and thunderous threats, Russia and the United States will not fight a direct war over Ukraine, at least not any time soon.
The future of the Donbass conflict, which is already effectively a proxy war between US-sponsored Ukraine and the Russia-backed Donbass republics, will hinge on Putin and Biden’s ability to strike new and bigger deals.
There are indications that the two leaders have already made progress on certain issues. For instance, the most recent version of the US National Defense Spending Act for Fiscal Year 2022 does not include a provision to bring sanctions over Russia’s Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, built to ship fuel into Europe.
On the other hand, the US House of Representatives approved a 2022 annual defense spending bill that includes $300 million in aid for Ukraine. Even though such a measure worries Russia, the country’s powerful energy giants such as Gazprom, Lukoil, Rosneft, among others, still have no reasons to fear Western sanctions.
According to US officials, even if Russia invades Ukraine, Washington will likely not impose any restrictions on Moscow’s energy business. It is, however, entirely possible that the West will soon impose certain “preemptive” sanctions on Russia – although an invasion may never take place – that will undoubtedly impact on the Russian economy.
It is energy exports, rather than fears of alleged NATO expansion eastward, that are mainly driving Russia’s foreign policy. That is why a potential return of the Donbass – where coal production is de facto controlled by Russia and its proxies – to Ukraine would represent a greater loss for the Kremlin than the Eastern European country’s potential NATO membership.
14. Embrace the Arms Race in Asia
Excerpts:
My Chinese students in the strategic studies classes I teach often argue that Washington is maneuvering to trick Beijing into starting a war that will then leave it diplomatically isolated against the international community. This is called a justification-of-war crisis. This is commonly but falsely believed to be the strategy used by the United States to attack Spain in 1898 (the Main Affair), Germany in 1917 (the Zimmerman Telegram), Japan in 1941 (that President Franklin Roosevelt anticipated the Pearl Harbor air attack), North Vietnam in 1965 (the Gulf of Tonkin incident), Grenada in 1983 (the vulnerable medical students), Iran in 1988 (the shooting down of an Iranian airliner), Iraq in 1991 (Secretary of State James Baker’s ultimatum to Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz), and Serbia in 1999 (the allegedly Serbian mortar attack on a market).
The Reagan arms build-up of the 1980s may not have directly ended the Cold War or liberated the Warsaw Pact countries from their puppet regimes, but it kept the confrontation with the Soviet Union from turning hot. It also bought precious time for the Russians to resolve the contradictions in their political development, significantly reducing the subsequent level of hostility. The consequences of the faltering attempts to deter Nazi expansionism are a far more vivid reminder of the costs of military unpreparedness than is the stylized and unsupported assertion that World War I was caused by arms race tensions.
China will predictably stoke concerns about arms races, while avoiding any arms control constraints on their own military build-up. If China closes the gap on, for example, the number of ocean-going platforms, or submarines, or total missile tubes, or achieves a sufficient concentration in sea denial systems, such as sea mines or anti-ship ballistic missiles, then Beijing will view war as an attractive option. The likelihood of war will be reduced dramatically, therefore, if the United States and its democratic allies commit to the procurement of a sustainably robust defense.
Embrace the Arms Race in Asia - War on the Rocks
There is a lot of concern that the rapid build-up in Asia of Chinese and American military power will make war more likely, and that such a war between nuclear-armed powers will be hugely destructive. In this view, arms races are wasteful tragedies that unfold when adversaries fail to negotiate security at a cheaper level of expenditures. Warnings about arms races are also used by concerned anti-war groups, and by China as part of its public diplomacy campaign. For example, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesmen Zhao Lijian warned that “the US, the UK and Australia’s cooperation in nuclear submarines severely damages regional peace and stability, intensifies the arms race.”
But arms races do not cause war. Every case of war that followed an arms build-up was the consequence of the weakness of the attacked party. Any caution by the United States and its allies in equipping for war will reduce deterrence, and will set the circumstances for whether there is a decision to go to war in Beijing. It will tempt Beijing with the prospect of a successful fait accompli attack against Taiwan and its outlying islands of Kinmen, Wuqiu, Matsu, Pratas, Itu Aba, and Penghu.
The popular idea of an arms race is that two adversarial countries are in a confrontational build-up of weapons and soldiers, the accumulation of which worsens tensions, produces misunderstandings, and leads to war, either because of an accident, or because of a desperate bid by one side to seize the initiative and attack because of an unpredictably closing window of opportunity. The notion of an armaments competition goes back to the 1859–1861 Anglo-French naval war scares, during which French technical expertise temporarily surpassed the English in the construction of ocean-going ironclad battleships. The term “arms race” is a British journalistic expression, possibly first used in 1921, of the competitive Anglo-German ship-building spree starting in 1898.
The naval arms race in Northeast Asia most commonly involves comparing total ship numbers in the People’s Liberation Army-Navy and the U.S. Navy. With this crude indicator, China’s naval fleet is expected to rise from 355 in 2021, to 460 by 2030, as compared with 297 ships currently in the U.S. Navy. However, in naval warfare on the open seas, counting platforms capable of launching anti-ship missiles and amphibious ships provide a better comparison of naval power. Although, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies’ Military Balance, China has only increased its fleet from 138 to 145 major combat vessels since 2005, of these, fully 49 submarines and 68 surface ships were newly built after 2005. China has a further 179 coastal combatants (55 Type-056, 60 Type-022, 24 Type 037) with 840 deck missile types that may play a role along the Taiwanese littoral and the Filipino island of Luzon. Limited sensors, air defense, and storm worthiness makes these of limited use in open waters. In contrast, the U.S. fleet has declined by 12 vessels to 213 major naval combatants since 2005, excluding aircraft carriers. China is also expected to surpass the United States in numbers of submarines. According to the Defense Department’s latest report on China’s military power, if Beijing maintains the same rate and proportion of shipbuilding, then by 2030, it will possess 187 major surface combatants, and 70 attack submarines. The U.S. Navy maintains a major advantage, however, in the number of missile tubes. It currently possesses 9,044 vertical launch tubes (though not all are filled), as compared with China’s 1,696, a critical measure of a fleet’s firepower. These launch systems are a marked improvement over turrets, because their elimination of reload delays, enables a higher response rate against a saturation attack of anti-ship missiles.
However, in a fight to establish sea control and blockades in the oceans, aircraft carriers will predominate because of their unsurpassed scouting range, and because the quantity of aircraft-dropped ordinance dramatically outnumbers ship-launched anti-ship missiles, at ranges of up to several hundred nautical miles. And here, the United States has a clear advantage: If we include amphibious ships capable of carrying the F-35, the U.S. Navy has a critical lead in aircraft carriers over China (20 versus, soon to be 3, by 2024), although — troublingly — the United States is still having difficulty making the political choices necessary to focus military resources on the Indo-Pacific.
True, U.S. aircraft carriers would be vulnerable if Chinese submarines, maritime patrol aircraft, and satellites were to be overcome its anti-scouting techniques. But this speaks to the importance of the U.S. effort to keep up with China’s arms build-up. Further, it’s often noted that China has a large detection network of maritime militia and 16,000 fishing vessels. If the next war follows the practices of World War II, these non-combatants will lose their legal protections afforded by the 1907 Hague Convention, and will not be able to remain at sea. Japan, anticipating the vulnerability of its commercial fleets, recalled them from the Atlantic on July 2, 1941. During the war, the U.S. blockade targeted Japanese vessels as small as 25 tons, inflicting 70,000 casualties on Japan’s merchant marines. The 130 P-8A/I Poseidon platform used by the United States and its allies in Asia, may be equipped for cost-effective blockade enforcement. Furthermore, given China’s precarious food security situation, a naval blockade of China’s food imports may be a significant deterrent.
Measuring the precise extent of an arms race and the balance of forces becomes more complicated as we consider the disposition of third-party navies in more distant seas. Although the Chinese fleet is concentrated in the Northeast Pacific, opposite a U.S. fleet dispersed across the world’s oceans, China must also contend with the significant allied fleets of Japan, Taiwan, and Australia, comprising 73, 30, and 17 major surface combatants, respectively. They also total 1,372 missile launch tubes, almost the same number as China. India is predisposed to policing the maritime lanes across the Indian Ocean but has been drawn in to extensive military-related discussions through the auspices of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (known as the Quad) and its ever-closer relationship with the United States. The manner in which Russia would use its fleet is the big wildcard.
It is often feared that arms races are the cause of war among great powers, because arms barons and war profiteers influence foreign policy, as first elaborated by John Hobson in his 1902 book, Imperialism, an influential work for Vladimir Lenin and subsequent Marxist theorists. However, as naval and strategic historian Bernard Brodie pointed out, Hobson later repudiated his whole argument as unsophisticated. The United States certainly has significant forensic and legislative experience in exercising scrutiny over its arms providers. Furthermore, a direct comparison of expenditures with China is misleading because 38 percent of the $690 billion U.S. defense budget is dedicated to salaries and benefits, and at least 10 percent of that budget is dedicated to strategic transportation. Whereas militaries in the developing world typically spend ten percent or less on salaries, China’s personnel spending reported to the United Nations is an average of approximately 30 percent, which raises issues about comparability.
There is an influential and parallel academic debate that pits proponents of the spiral model, who assert that arms race dynamics do indeed increase the likelihood of war, against the deterrence perspective argued here. The spiral model is grounded in the mechanism of a security dilemma, in which preparations for defense are misinterpreted as preparations for war, and the independent variable of tension, in which rising mutual hostility increases the likelihood of war. The weaknesses of the spiral model are that it is dependent on difficult-to-measure psychological factors, and relies on mathematical models that tend to be detached from reality. World War I is often raised by spiral theorists as the archetype of pre-war tensions unintentionally escalating disputes to war. This interpretation is largely the result of bias within political science of looking for unintentional mechanisms of war associated with nuclear deterrence, whereas among military historians, there is a consensus that the culprit was German militarism. The 1914 July Crisis that preceded it was subsequently used as a model for the risk of escalation to nuclear conflict during the Cold War, and influenced key decision-makers. For example, President John F. Kennedy had read Barbara Tuchman’s Guns of August just before the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
However, more recent historiography has reached a consensus and found that the 1914 July Crisis was deliberately exploited by Germany to manipulatively mobilize Austria-Hungary. The best new treatment of the case is by Dale Copeland, who demonstrates that states exploit closing windows of opportunity, rather than slipping into war unintentionally. In contrast, those who think arms races are dangerous, predict that the easy availability of weapons, or presence of large arsenals themselves, stokes war-causing tensions. The starkest counter-evidence of this is the paradoxical absence of Pakistani-Iranian security competition, despite their significant arsenals, comfortable use of force by both regimes, and aggressive assertion of their respective spheres of influence. In fact, Tehran and Islamabad strategically ignore each other.
In contrast, deterrence approaches have much better evidence. Since the 1940s, academics and think-tanks have explored such counter-intuitive nuclear weapons concepts as perfect stability, missile defense instability, tacit bargaining, protecting allies, and the impact of proliferation on war. Research programs using the Militarized Interstate Dispute dataset from the Correlates of War project, and the International Crisis Behavior Project, culminated in the rational deterrence debate at the end of the 1980s. The result was also a rich collection of case studies. Good predictive models of deterrence remain elusive because of the rarity of deterrence failure, and differing risk orientations of leaders (which explains why weaker powers sometimes attack stronger powers). It is also difficult to estimate state power and credibility, not least because states always have an incentive to misrepresent their strength.
Arms races are therefore not the cause of the war, but both the arms race and the war are the result of the common prior cause of a political disagreement. If you focus closely enough on either the trigger for a conflict, or its underlying cause, you will find, instead, deterrence failure: Where leaders deliberately sought to use force, either successfully, or unsuccessfully because they under-estimated the strength of their adversary. Arms races heighten the fears of war two ways: First, state leaders become anxious about running out of resources to maintain their defense, and second, they become concerned about foregoing closing windows of opportunity for action, that may never recur.
But the arms race itself is simply the emergent property of the strategic interaction of two states engaged in a military build-up for either defensive or offensive reasons. Here, I examine the alleged effects of arms races by addressing three commonly held beliefs about their link to wars. First, that arms races cause war by triggering unintended accidents. Second, that weapons have an independent influence on policy. Third, that arsenals play a major role in decisions for war.
First, wars resulting from unintended technical accidents, have never occurred in history. The Chinese march into Tibet in 1949, intervention in Korea in 1950, assault on India in the Aksai China in October 1962, attack on the Vietnamese in the Paracel Islands in 1974, punitive operation against Vietnam in 1979, were all surprises, but none were unintended. All of these engagements and campaigns were faithful to Carl von Clausewitz’s dictum of war being an instrument of policy. The 1969 Sino-Soviet border conflict may have been unintended, but this was the result of a fragmented Beijing regime during the Cultural Revolution.
A conceivable accident scenario is of a confused encounter between Chinese and U.S. vessels in restricted waters in the South China Sea, and local flotilla commanders escalate the clash into a major naval exchange of anti-ship missiles. It is certainly a worthwhile concern in the realm of nuclear weapons, since a misfired rocket, a weather event, or 99 balloons, triggering a false radar alert, may lead a to a missile launch that triggers a retaliatory nuclear strike. A colleague of mine recounted how during a British training exercise in Cold War West Germany during the 1970s, his mobile missile unit fired an Honest John rocket having forgotten to detach the trailer, and watched in horror as the trailer was propelled into the sky over the German countryside.
Rather, war can be caused by accidents interpreted as taking risks: When we drive to the bakery to buy bread before it closes, we don’t intend to have a road accident, but we risk it. Decision-makers may trigger, or take advantage of crises, by threatening to escalate violence in order to compel an adversary to back down. This brinkmanship crisis is what happened between the United States and Soviet Union during the Cuban Missile Crisis. However, crises are more psychological than tangible. The United States compelled the Soviet Union to back-down by forcing on Moscow the last best decision to avoid war, specifically to turn their merchant fleet around before hitting the U.S. blockade. The equivalent of this is playing chicken, in which two teenagers each drive a car towards the other to compel the other off a narrow road, and one of them throws the steering wheel out the window, empowering themselves by surrendering the ability to deescalate. Consequently, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev could just as easily have shifted the decision to avoid war onto President John F. Kennedy, by sailing through the blockade, and forcing Washington to face the difficult decision of firing the first shot. Why Khrushchev blinked and folded is still being debated. The arms race, or its absence, did not cause the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Cuban Missile Crisis happened when Washington challenged a Kremlin policy initiative in the Caribbean.
Second, although the influence of weapons on decisions for war is complicated and difficult to trace through the policy process, their effect is typically instrumental to achieving a political objective. Weapons were merely a facilitative influence in World War II: The fascist regimes pursued war once their arms buildup gave them a sufficient superiority over their neighbors. However, the more typical dynamic is that countries become entangled in repeated crises with adversaries that transform their governments’ composition. If the regimes are preponderately non-military, these disputes fall into the arena of international lawyers, because war is recognized to be much costlier than negotiation. However, crises teach fatal lessons to cost-unconscious politicians. Each crisis lost educates leaders to be less compromising, and each crisis won vindicates coercion: In both paths, cabinet decision-making is militarized by the increasing incorporation of military advisers. It was a series of crises in North Africa, the Balkans, and Europe in the decade before World War I thatz systematically militarized the European diplomatic system, and that turned the July 1914 assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo, into a costly war.
Third, weapons are rarely a cause of war because, except with regard to nuclear weapons, countries can obtain more power from alliances than they can from their own armaments industry. It is commonly thought that Israel attacked Egypt, Syria, and Jordan in June 1967 because of an overwhelming first strike advantage of its air force. However, repeated votes in the Israeli cabinet denied the military demand for a first strike during the pre-war crisis, despite the high costs to Israel’s air force if it was attacked first. It was only after President Lyndon B. Johnson reversed his threat to sanction Israel if Tel Aviv attacked first, that the civilian members of the Israeli cabinet finally voted for war. The problem was that in 1956, in conjunction with its Anglo-French allies, Israel handily defeated the Egyptian army, but was then humiliatingly compelled by the Eisenhower administration to withdraw from the Sinai.
China’s intervention in Korea in 1950 (with approval and support from Moscow), India’s invasion of East Pakistan in 1971 (following an international diplomatic campaign by Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi), Egypt’s attack on Israel in 1973 (targeting the desire of the United States to exclude Soviet influence in the Middle East), and Iraq’s attack on Iran in 1980 (with Gulf Arab and U.S. approval), were all underpinned by solid diplomatic strategies taking primacy over concerns of relative power. In circumstances where diplomatic strategies were poorly conceived by the war initiator, such as Argentina’s 1982 amphibious landing on the Falklands, and the 2009 Georgian-Russian conflict, decisions were not influenced by anything more than the availability of some minimum sufficient arsenal. Countries do go to war because they perceive their own long-term decline, as Germany and the Ottoman Empire did vis-à-vis Russia in 1914 and 1915, or as Pakistan did in 1965 against India, but these decisions were also not influenced by weapons, as much as by the anticipated underlying power that enabled weapons manufacture.
My Chinese students in the strategic studies classes I teach often argue that Washington is maneuvering to trick Beijing into starting a war that will then leave it diplomatically isolated against the international community. This is called a justification-of-war crisis. This is commonly but falsely believed to be the strategy used by the United States to attack Spain in 1898 (the Main Affair), Germany in 1917 (the Zimmerman Telegram), Japan in 1941 (that President Franklin Roosevelt anticipated the Pearl Harbor air attack), North Vietnam in 1965 (the Gulf of Tonkin incident), Grenada in 1983 (the vulnerable medical students), Iran in 1988 (the shooting down of an Iranian airliner), Iraq in 1991 (Secretary of State James Baker’s ultimatum to Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz), and Serbia in 1999 (the allegedly Serbian mortar attack on a market).
The Reagan arms build-up of the 1980s may not have directly ended the Cold War or liberated the Warsaw Pact countries from their puppet regimes, but it kept the confrontation with the Soviet Union from turning hot. It also bought precious time for the Russians to resolve the contradictions in their political development, significantly reducing the subsequent level of hostility. The consequences of the faltering attempts to deter Nazi expansionism are a far more vivid reminder of the costs of military unpreparedness than is the stylized and unsupported assertion that World War I was caused by arms race tensions.
China will predictably stoke concerns about arms races, while avoiding any arms control constraints on their own military build-up. If China closes the gap on, for example, the number of ocean-going platforms, or submarines, or total missile tubes, or achieves a sufficient concentration in sea denial systems, such as sea mines or anti-ship ballistic missiles, then Beijing will view war as an attractive option. The likelihood of war will be reduced dramatically, therefore, if the United States and its democratic allies commit to the procurement of a sustainably robust defense.
Julian Spencer-Churchill, Ph.D., is associate professor of international relations at Concordia University, author of Militarization and War (2007), and of Strategic Nuclear Sharing (2014), and former operations officer, 3 Field Engineer Regiment. He has published extensively on Pakistan, where he conducted fieldwork for over 10 years.
15. Swarm Talk: Understanding Drone Typology
Excerpts:
Militaries should experiment with different combinations of drones. What combination of attack, sensor, communication, decoy, and mothership drones are most effective in various circumstances? That should include not only ratios of the different types of drone, but the combinations within specific classes. For example, should a counterswarm swarm include more electronic or kinetic attack drones? The answer will also likely vary based on the domain(s) of use and the other types of deployed weapon systems and platforms. Figuring that out may require modeling and simulation, exercises, and wargaming using both real and synthetic environments.
Battlefield commanders should also consider how drone swarm characteristics mesh up with operational details. A commander may flex the number and type of drones based on collected intelligence about likely threats. The commander may want to add more communication drones to prepare for possible electronic attack, or add specific types of attack drones designed to target, say, tanks or infantry formations.
The era of the drone swarm has just begun. Israel’s use of a drone swarm in combat earlier this year might have been the first such instance, but it will not be the last. That means that militaries need to make a concentrated effort to think carefully about how to design and build optimal drone swarms to achieve mission objectives.
Swarm Talk: Understanding Drone Typology - Modern War Institute
In May 2021, during its conflict with Hamas, the Israel Defense Forces became the first military to use a drone swarm in combat. Not much is known about the event, other than that Israel used the drone swarm to strike “dozens” of targets in concert with other missiles and munitions. Often media outlets use the phrase “drone swarm” to just mean many drones used at once. But this was a true drone swarm, meaning the drones communicated and collaborated in making collective decisions.
The event is just the beginning. Numerous states from South Africa to South Korea are developing or acquiring drone swarms intended to operate across land, sea, air, and potentially even space. Drone swarms may operate in multiple domains at once, incorporating different types of weapons payloads and sensors. To manage this complexity, militaries need a basic typology for sorting different types of drones.
The most intuitive—and useful—such typology would categorize drones within a drone swarm based on the role they play within the swarm. These categories would not necessarily be discrete, because a single drone could play multiple roles in theory. Likewise, drone swarms may have different combinations of drone types based on the mission. A swarm of undersea drones meant to create a distributed sensor network for submarine searches will look very different than an aerial swarm to suppress enemy air defenses. Ideally, a drone swarm should also be flexible to allow mission commanders to adjust the swarm composition based on mission parameters, perhaps incorporating different types of attack or sensor drones. With those facts in mind, a set of five categories takes shape: attack, sensor, communication, decoy, and mothership drones.
Attack (and other Effects)
Attack drones carry weapons payloads to strike enemy targets. This can be any sort of weapons payload from guns and bombs to missiles, electronic attack, and chemical weapons. Drones may also have other types of effects, such as chemical weapons disinfectants or mine countermeasures. The type of payload will, of course, be limited by the carry-weight of the drone. A tiny quadcopter is not carrying a Hellfire missile. But a large unmanned surface vessel might carry a Tomahawk missile.
Different types of attack drones may be used for combined arms tactics. They could also mix conventional weapons with other effects—for states flouting legal bans, this could even mean chemical weapons—within a swarm to create dilemmas for defenders: Do they don protective gear or dodge the hail of bullets? Of course, such a drone swarm would violate the Chemical Weapons Convention; however, the United States and others may face it on the battlefield. Likewise, multiple payloads create options for responding to different types of defenders and targets. One drone may carry an antitank missile, while others carry bombs or guns.
Sensor
Sensor drones capture information about the environment. That information can be used for the swarm to identify targets and to avoid defenders and hazards. Information collected may be shared with the broader swarm to help guide movement, carry out strikes, or make simple decisions on swarm behavior. Typical sensors include electro-optical, infrared, and LIDAR (light detection and ranging). Specialized sensors for chemical, biological, or radiological material may be incorporated as well. Sensors may be on the drone itself, or the drone may distribute the sensors throughout a real or potential battlefield.
Sensor drones enable a particularly useful behavior of drone swarms: the ability to create dispersed sensor networks. Drones with different sensor types can spread broadly over an area to collect intelligence, identify targets, or watch for incoming attacks. When a drone identifies an object of interest, it can share that with the broader swarm, perhaps drawing in more sensor drones to search the area for similar objects or confirmation. That is especially useful for identifying mobile targets that are often more difficult to find and fix.
Sensor drones may be integrated with other drone types. For example, Russia claims to be testing a swarm with integrated aerial sensor and ground attack drones in which the aerial drones feed information to the ground drones to guide its fires. Likewise, sensor drones may recognize the presence of a defender system and share that information with decoy drones to confound and disrupt that system.
Communication
Electronic warfare is a crucial vulnerability for drone swarms. The key characteristic of a drone swarm is communication between the drones. So disrupting or manipulating that communication is an obvious way to disrupt or manipulate the entire drone swarm. Electronic attack could target either the communication between the drones or the signals from any ground control station and the drones. This approach is quite common for drones generally, as a strong majority of counterdrone systems are some form of signal jammer.
Communication drones help ensure the drone swarm maintains its integrity. The drones may serve as relay nodes for communications from external sources, provide an alternative route for interswarm communication, serve as a signal boost in the event of adversary jamming, or provide emergency retreat orders on unjammed frequencies. The design and behavior of such a drone also would need to accommodate the role. As primarily a support or backup function, the communication drone would need to avoid being caught in enemy fire. Likely, it would also need to devote more power output to ensuring any broadcasted signal stays strong.
Decoy
Decoys do not do all that much. Mostly they get in the way. But that can be useful. Mass is one major advantage of drone swarms. More and more drones can be thrown at a target until it is overwhelmed and destroyed. The swarm may lose a few drones in the process, but if enough get through, there can still be victory at relatively low cost. Decoy drones increase that mass at low cost, because they do not require any integrated weapons, sensors, or other payloads. They are mostly there to absorb defender fires and protect the more valuable drones.
Of course, decoys can be made more sophisticated. They may be designed to give off signatures to trick defenders into believing they are actually manned aircraft. For example, during the 1973 October War, Israel used drones to trick Egyptian air defenses into turning on their radar and firing against the wrong targets. This wasted Egyptian ammunition, but more significantly it helped Israel identify the location of the defenses. Israel did the same during the 1983 conflict with Syria over the Bekaa valley. Alternatively, decoy drones may be used to convince defenders that the bulk of the swarm is in another location, which would complicate response to an already omnidirectional attack.
Motherships
Mothership drones contain other drones. In some cases—what has been evocatively described as a “turducken of lethality”—one mothership drone contains another mothership drone. Mothership drones help transport the drone swarm to and from the battlefield, and may also provide support for recharging, rearming, or general maintenance. Because mothership drones must necessarily be significantly larger than all the drones they contain (and consequently, require significantly more power), motherships drones may also support broader swarm communication and integration. Of course, mothership drones also create vulnerabilities, because they can be targeted to destroy the whole swarm in a single strike.
Implications
When it comes to drone swarms, complexity is the name of the game. A drone swarm may contain all sorts of drones of different shapes, sizes, and roles. Preparing to use and defend against a drone swarm requires simplifying that complexity to figure out what really works and what does not. That’s where a properly defined typology proves its worth.
Militaries should experiment with different combinations of drones. What combination of attack, sensor, communication, decoy, and mothership drones are most effective in various circumstances? That should include not only ratios of the different types of drone, but the combinations within specific classes. For example, should a counterswarm swarm include more electronic or kinetic attack drones? The answer will also likely vary based on the domain(s) of use and the other types of deployed weapon systems and platforms. Figuring that out may require modeling and simulation, exercises, and wargaming using both real and synthetic environments.
Battlefield commanders should also consider how drone swarm characteristics mesh up with operational details. A commander may flex the number and type of drones based on collected intelligence about likely threats. The commander may want to add more communication drones to prepare for possible electronic attack, or add specific types of attack drones designed to target, say, tanks or infantry formations.
The era of the drone swarm has just begun. Israel’s use of a drone swarm in combat earlier this year might have been the first such instance, but it will not be the last. That means that militaries need to make a concentrated effort to think carefully about how to design and build optimal drone swarms to achieve mission objectives.
Zachary Kallenborn is a research affiliate of the Unconventional Weapons and Technology Division of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, headquartered at the University of Maryland, an official US Army Training and Doctrine Command “Mad Scientist,” and a national security and homeland security consultant. His research has been written about in various media outlets including Forbes, Popular Mechanics, the National Interest, MSN, Shephard Media, and Yahoo News!.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Image: A swarm of drones scans the Cassidy Range Complex at Fort Campbell in a scenario conducted November 16 during the final field experiment for DARPA’s OFFensive Swarm Enabled Tactics, or OFFSET, program. (Credit: Jerry Woller, US Army / Fort Campbell Public Affairs Office)
16. The China threat and lessons from the collapse of the Soviet Union
Excerpts:
We urgently need much more considered and cautious studies about the pros and cons of China’s emerging power. For this to be credible in terms of formulating the China threat assessment, we need to see deeply expert analysis about the strengths and weaknesses not only of China’s military power but also of its demographics, corruption and pollution challenges, as well as informative studies of domestic turmoil and the party’s reaction to Xi Jinping’s growing dictatorship.
And we need to remember that Beijing spends as much on internal security as on external defence, which should tell us a lot.
Most importantly, China has no experience whatsoever of fighting modern warfare. And when we proclaim that the Chinese leadership believes this or that, we need to acknowledge that, as with the former Soviet Union, we have no intelligence sources in Beijing’s Politburo.
The China threat and lessons from the collapse of the Soviet Union | The Strategist
This month marks 30 years since the USSR collapsed voluntarily. It’s rare in world history that such a militarily powerful empire disappears without going to war. The Soviet Union had 12,000 strategic nuclear warheads, 260 divisions with 50,000 tanks, 7,000 combat aircraft, 370 submarines (including 94 tactical nuclear attack submarines) and some 260 principal surface combatants. Western intelligence assessments until almost the very end continued to see it as a power with few real weaknesses. As late as 1986 the then deputy director of the CIA, Robert Gates, told me that the Soviet Union was poised to outstrip America in military power.
Why did US intelligence assessments fail to predict the end of the USSR, and does this have any relevance for today’s assessment of the threat from China?
First, it must be recognised that the Soviet Union was an incredibly difficult intelligence target. There were several reasons for this: the secrecy of the Soviet state and the unreliability of its statistics, the paucity of any publicly available military data that could be depended upon, and the lack of intelligence sources inside the Kremlin. There was an acute ideological suspicion of the USSR that made even modest attempts at a more balanced approach subject to ridicule and outright hostility, including in Australia. Even so, there was plenty of evidence for those of us who visited the USSR that something was acutely wrong with an economy that couldn’t supply even the most basic needs of food and housing for its population.
Second, there was real fear—especially in the 1970s—that Soviet economic growth rates were outstripping those in an America that was in the throes of stagflation and its defeat in Vietnam. Moscow’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 was seen in some quarters—not least by Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser—as the beginning of World War III and a real threat to the West’s crucial access to oil supplies from the Persian Gulf. On almost every front, the USSR seemed to be on a winning streak. So, there was deep concern throughout the Western alliance system that the USSR was creating a geopolitical situation in which ‘the correlation of world forces’ was moving decisively in Moscow’s favour.
Third, this sense of palpable fear that the Soviet Union was winning, and the West was losing, the arms race led to an acute sense of paranoia in US intelligence agencies. In the Western world’s most powerful intelligence establishment—the CIA—the head of Soviet counterespionage, James Jesus Angleton, believed that the agency was riddled with Soviet spies. Even in Canberra, the head of the Office of National Assessments considered that anybody who did not hold his views of the USSR was working for the other side.
This world of extreme fear meant that there was little recognition that Mikhail Gorbachev was attempting serious reforms of the Soviet political and economic system. Even now, there is no agreement about the fundamental reasons for the collapse of the USSR. Many Americans still believe that they outspent the Russians into oblivion in the arms race. Others think that it was the failed 10-year occupation of Afghanistan that was the trigger for the Soviet collapse. Still others—including me—focus on the prolonged stagnation of the Soviet Union’s economy and society.
The economic crisis played a central but often underestimated role in the last few years of Soviet history. In a new book, Collapse: the fall of the Soviet Union, historian Vladislav Zubok asserts that Gorbachev’s policy of openness and transparency greatly contributed to the rise of anti-communist and nationalist movements. Gorbachev’s decisions generated a voluntary and unprecedented devolution of power that eroded the ideological legitimacy of the Communist Party. Zubok concludes that Gorbachev’s leadership, character and beliefs constituted a major factor in the Soviet Union’s self-destruction. Under a different leader, there was no reason why the Soviet system could not have staggered on for several more decades—like North Korea, for example.
Turning now to the China threat assessment, I consider there is a grave danger that—yet again—the West is failing to see that country’s real weaknesses. And once more we are being asked to conform to the dominant view that China is all powerful, and that its economy and military are superior to those of America, or soon will be.
I detect the same inclination to accept self-serving claims that China’s military technologies are superior to those of the US. For instance, claims are made that the latest Chinese submarines are quieter than those of the US, even though America has been at submarine quieting for over 70 years and China is a Johnny-come-lately. It is also claimed that China’s DF-21D ballistic missile can destroy US aircraft carriers when we have no reliable data at all about the accuracy of China’s missile systems against a moving target.
We are supposed to be awed by the fact that China is now deploying multiple independently targetable nuclear warheads for its intercontinental ballistic missiles, which was a technology the Soviet Union developed in 1975 for its SS-18 ICBMs. And, contrary to the breathless claims that China’s recent testing of a fractional orbital bombardment system was unprecedented, the Soviet Union deployed 18 FOBS missiles more than 50 years ago (between 1971 and 1979) that could deliver their warheads into low-earth orbit and attack the US from its unprotected south.
China’s economic and military growth have been truly amazing over the past two decades, while America’s back has been turned in Afghanistan and the Middle East, but the fact is that China is not yet a military superpower like the former USSR.
We urgently need much more considered and cautious studies about the pros and cons of China’s emerging power. For this to be credible in terms of formulating the China threat assessment, we need to see deeply expert analysis about the strengths and weaknesses not only of China’s military power but also of its demographics, corruption and pollution challenges, as well as informative studies of domestic turmoil and the party’s reaction to Xi Jinping’s growing dictatorship.
And we need to remember that Beijing spends as much on internal security as on external defence, which should tell us a lot.
Most importantly, China has no experience whatsoever of fighting modern warfare. And when we proclaim that the Chinese leadership believes this or that, we need to acknowledge that, as with the former Soviet Union, we have no intelligence sources in Beijing’s Politburo.
17. Is this how World War III begins?
Cyber.
Excerpts:
In a long, drawn-out modern war, cyber operations will play a part. Military forces may no longer be able to rely on the satellites they have grown so dependent on. Expensive weapons platforms that rely on modern communications to operate may prove a wasted investment compared to old-fashioned tanks, guns and artillery.
But cyber operations are unlikely to be decisive on their own. For years, airpower enthusiasts were predicting that strategic bombing would replace the need for traditional ground operations. We’re still waiting. Airpower alone has never won a war (as distinct from contributing to victory). Events are normally decided on the ground. In the same way, future wars are unlikely to be decided in cyberspace alone.
The real danger of cyberwarfare is not that it will replace kinetic operations, but that it will incite them. The line between war and peace is reasonably clear when dealing with tanks, warships and aircraft, but it is grey when dealing with malware and online bots. If countries feel safer engaging in conflict behind the veil of anonymity provided by the internet, the risk of a catastrophic miscalculation increases.
Is this how World War III begins? | The Strategist
In October, Facebook and its related social media platforms went down in mysterious circumstances for six hours. On the same day, China sent 52 military aircraft into Taiwan’s air defence zone, the largest and most provocative incursion yet. If military theorists are correct, headlines like these will be the precursor to World War III.
A Chinese invasion of Taiwan is a scenario that many fear will be the catalyst for the next major international war. And most pundits believe cyber warfare will play a major role in such a conflict, or indeed any future international wars. So a cyberattack that knocks out the American media to hide or distract attention from a Chinese move against Taiwan is not unrealistic.
To be clear, there’s no suggestion that the Facebook outage and the Chinese incursion were linked. But it’s a timely reminder of how vulnerable our networked world is to cyberattack. What role would cyberwarfare play in a future conflict, and is it as important as traditional ‘kinetic’ military operations?
There are three ways in which cyberwarfare may play a role: as an alternative to, as an opening gambit of, or alongside kinetic operations.
Some believe that the emerging theatre of cyberwarfare will completely displace traditional military operations, or indeed that it has already happened. That might be true, but if so it isn’t much to worry about. Shutting down Facebook, closing an oil pipeline or interfering with the operations of a power plant, airport, bank or factory are all disruptive and costly. But the damage is temporary, and the world moves on. Cybercrime is part of the background noise of a modern economy, whether instigated by lone hackers, organised crime groups or state actors. But that’s not to say it has no cost.
Defending against and dealing with cyberattacks are a drain on economic growth, but modern nation-states are robust and resilient institutions. If cyber operations are the sole plan a nation adopts to defeat an enemy, it would take a very long time and would certainly involve reciprocal action against the initiating side that might be similarly damaging. If that’s what World War III will be, we can rest relatively easy at night.
Of course, a highly effective cyberattack might shut down an entire country for some time. Imagine the disruption to a modern developed economy if it lost power, communications and access to the internet all at once and it continued for months. But such an attack would be so devastating that the victim would likely feel a line had been crossed and that it was an overt act of war. Retaliation probably wouldn’t be limited to cyberspace.
Cyber operations could facilitate kinetic operations (like an invasion of Taiwan, for example) by disrupting the other side’s communications so that its military hardware was temporarily powerless to respond. Modern military forces are blind without radar and satellite imagery, deaf without the internet and mute without secure telecommunications systems. In a short war, this might be all that’s needed. If Taiwan was temporarily blinded by a cyberattack, in a month the country might be overrun, without the Taiwanese getting off a shot.
But in a longer war, any benefit of throwing the first cyber punch will be temporary. Systems will inevitably be restored or workarounds found. A ship at sea can fire its guns and missiles without satellites. Tank crews and ground troops were perfectly capable of raining death on their foes before the internet. In World War II, Germany landed a devastating first blow on the Soviet Union in June 1941 when it launched a surprise attack—Operation Barbarossa—that caught the Soviet air force on the ground and their troops unprepared. Japan was also successful at knocking out large parts of the American Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor in a surprise raid. These initial successes didn’t bring the Axis victory. The greater resources of the Allies meant they recovered, wore down their enemies and crushed them. A cyber Pearl Harbor is no guarantee of enduring success.
In a long, drawn-out modern war, cyber operations will play a part. Military forces may no longer be able to rely on the satellites they have grown so dependent on. Expensive weapons platforms that rely on modern communications to operate may prove a wasted investment compared to old-fashioned tanks, guns and artillery.
But cyber operations are unlikely to be decisive on their own. For years, airpower enthusiasts were predicting that strategic bombing would replace the need for traditional ground operations. We’re still waiting. Airpower alone has never won a war (as distinct from contributing to victory). Events are normally decided on the ground. In the same way, future wars are unlikely to be decided in cyberspace alone.
The real danger of cyberwarfare is not that it will replace kinetic operations, but that it will incite them. The line between war and peace is reasonably clear when dealing with tanks, warships and aircraft, but it is grey when dealing with malware and online bots. If countries feel safer engaging in conflict behind the veil of anonymity provided by the internet, the risk of a catastrophic miscalculation increases.
18. Soon, the Hackers Won’t Be Human - But AI Can Boost Cyber Defenses, Too
Excerpt:
The impact of uncontrolled cyberattacks is becoming ever more costly. It is past time for the United States to explore the potential for AI to improve its cyberdefenses to better protect critical infrastructure providers and state and local governments. There is little reason to believe that strategic competitors will not turn to AI-enabled attacks if traditional techniques lose their effectiveness. The stakes are high, and AI techniques are a double-edged sword. The United States must commit the resources to ensure that it is the defense that benefits.
Soon, the Hackers Won’t Be Human
But AI Can Boost Cyber Defenses, Too
December 10, 2021
It has been a challenging year for U.S. cyberdefense operations. A dramatic surge in ransomware attacks has targeted such critical national infrastructure as the Colonial Pipeline—which was shut down for six days in May, disrupting fuel supplies to 17 states—and halted the operation of thousands of American schools, businesses, and hospitals. The hacking of SolarWinds Orion software, which compromised the data of hundreds of major companies and government agencies and went undiscovered for at least eight months, demonstrated that even the best-resourced organizations remain vulnerable to malign actors.
While the motley crew of cybercriminals and state-sponsored hackers who constitute the offense has not yet widely adopted artificial intelligence techniques, many AI capabilities are accessible with few restrictions. If traditional cyberattacks begin to lose their effectiveness, the offense won’t hesitate to reach for AI-enabled ones to restore its advantage—evoking worst-case future scenarios in which AI-enabled agents move autonomously through networks, finding and exploiting vulnerabilities at unprecedented speed. Indeed, some of the most damaging global cyberattacks, such as the 2017 NotPetya attack, incorporated automated techniques, just not AI ones. These approaches rely on prescriptive, rules-based techniques, and lack the ability to adjust tactics on the fly, but can be considered the precursors of fully automated, “intelligent” agent–led attacks.
Yet it is not just cyberattackers who stand to benefit from AI. Machine learning and other AI techniques are beginning to bolster cyberdefense efforts as well, although not yet at the scale necessary to alter the advantage the offense presently enjoys. There is reason to hope that AI will become a game-changer for the defense. As offense and defense both race to leverage AI techniques, the question is which side will manage to benefit most.
PREPARING FOR AI-ENABLED HACKS
There is currently limited evidence that hackers have begun making significant use of AI techniques. This is not particularly surprising. Current techniques are highly effective, and adding AI to the mix could be an unnecessary complication. And while cyber and AI skill sets overlap to some degree, they are distinct enough that additional expertise is required to build and integrate AI techniques for cyberhacking.
If cyberdefenses improve sufficiently, however, the offense may be forced to explore new approaches. An individual or organization could also develop AI-enhanced cyber-tools that are simple to use, reducing the cost and level of expertise required to apply them. There is precedent for this. Some hackers, after discovering a vulnerability, sometimes release proof-of-concept code that is quickly weaponized and diffused through the hacker community. Given the open nature of AI research, there is little to prevent a similar diffusion of AI-enhanced cyberattack tools.
For the defense, machine learning is already benefiting specific cybersecurity tasks. A strength of machine learning is its ability to recognize patterns in large data sets. Algorithms similar to the ones that classify objects or recommend online purchases can be employed to detect suspicious activity on networks. The application of machine-learning techniques to traditional intrusion detection systems has undoubtedly already helped to thwart many attacks. For the rather mundane task of spam email detection, for example, machine learning has offered qualitative improvements. More recently, deep-learning facial recognition algorithms have allowed the authentication of users on their mobile devices, mitigating the long-standing cybersecurity problem of weak passwords or personal identification numbers.
DISCOVERING VULNERABILITIES
Vulnerable software and stolen user credentials are the basis of many cyberattacks. Intruders gain a foothold, exploit newly discovered or known vulnerabilities, and repeat the process. For this reason, two areas stand out as important targets for greater research and development investment: automated vulnerability discovery and AI-enabled autonomous cybersecurity.
Discovering vulnerabilities has long been an important part of the software development process. Attempts to automate this process are more recent. In 2016, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) hosted the Cyber Grand Challenge, a competition aimed at building fully automated systems capable of detecting and patching vulnerabilities in real time. Although the winning team, Mayhem, demonstrated this potential, they relied heavily on traditional vulnerability discovery tools fine-tuned for the competition; relatively little machine learning was involved. The open question is whether a broader application of AI could discernibly improve current techniques.
Autonomous cyber-agents that roam networks and launch attacks would be devastating if realized.
Many software applications, and operating systems in particular, contain millions of lines of code, making it difficult to detect every potential vulnerability. Automated techniques can help, in the same way that spelling and grammar checkers might help find errors in a long novel, but invariably a skilled human editor must scan every sentence. What has not yet occurred at any scale is the application of AI techniques to remove some of the cognitive workload or to improve upon existing capabilities.
While the Cyber Grand Challenge was taking place, another competition was building toward a famous showdown between human and machine. In this second contest, DeepMind, a subsidiary of Google, began building a system to play Go against the world’s best players. The game of Go is notable for having far more potential moves than its Western counterpart, chess. DeepMind’s system, AlphaGo, was in some ways a demonstration of AI’s potential for broader applications. More recently, DeepMind applied AI techniques to the Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction (CASP) competition to determine a protein’s underlying structure. As one prominent researcher described DeepMind’s breakthrough AI program, “This will change medicine. It will change research. It will change bioengineering. It will change everything.” While AlphaGo was intriguing, AlphaFold provided a means to better understand one of the key building blocks of the human body. Successes such as these across unrelated fields raise hopes that AI may prove similarly useful in the complex endeavor of cyberdefense.
However, as impressive as these new AI applications have been, there are no guarantees that it will be possible to develop autonomous cyberdefense agents. For the defense, a potentially potent tool has proved hard to implement across the entire range of cybersecurity-related tasks: threat identification, protection, detection, response, and recovery. Instead, it has been applied more narrowly to specific tasks such as intrusion detection. However, the technology’s potential is too important to ignore. In particular, the threat of autonomous cyber-agents that roam a network, probing for weaknesses and launching attacks, could be devastating if fully realized. Theoretically, attackers could launch thousands or more of these agents at once, wreaking havoc on critical infrastructure and businesses.
COULD AI REVOLUTIONIZE CYBERDEFENSE?
Will AI techniques enable even more devastating cyberattacks or will they revolutionize cyberdefense? Examining the evolution of cyberdefense operations over the last 30 years provides some clues as to how the integration of cyber and AI may evolve.
First, new attack tools will continue to disperse rapidly. The cyber-operations field has traditionally encouraged exploration and experimentation. Many early hacking efforts were simply attempts to bypass controls in order to gain access to more computing resources. Soon, the techniques pioneered by these early hackers entered the mainstream, becoming accessible to users with far more limited expertise. The rapid diffusion of new hacking methods continues to this day. Part of today’s cyber-challenge is that attackers with limited skills can wreak havoc on organizations with sophisticated tools they likely do not fully understand.
As new AI tools are developed, they are likely to quickly become available in the same manner. Relatively few people who launch deepfakes understand the underlying AI technology, but thanks to the availability of simple online tools, they can create synthetic video or audio with a few clicks of a mouse. Once offensive AI capabilities are developed, even moderately skilled hackers would be able to leverage them in their attacks.
Cyber has proved to be an asymmetric tool of statecraft. China has leveraged cyber to engage in the mass theft of intellectual property, thereby shortening the time frame to acquire and use key technologies. Russia has used cyber-operations coupled with disinformation campaigns to disrupt the U.S. political process. For cybercriminals, ransomware paired with cryptocurrencies offers an enormously profitable enterprise. If current techniques are foiled, there should be little doubt that states and criminal enterprises will turn to AI. The main reason they still have not leveraged AI capabilities is that they are not yet essential; simpler tools can still do the job.
China has signaled its intent to become the world leader in AI and has been making significant investments in cyber. Since DARPA’s Cyber Grand Challenge, for example, China has held over a dozen competitions focused on automated vulnerability discovery. This dual-use technology can help secure networks or provide new tools to state-sponsored hackers. China has invested heavily in the education of its cyber-workforce and in the development of a domestic semiconductor industry, and it has repeatedly shown its intent to match U.S. progress in AI. For example, it claims that its new large language model, Wu Dao, is more than ten times as large as GPT-3, the current standard for English-content creation. All of this suggests that China will attempt to leverage new technologies to pursue state policy whenever it can.
AI as applied to cyber will be driven by two different imperatives. For the offensive minded, AI tools will be designed to achieve maximum impact. Thus, the offense will seek tools that move fast, gain entry, and accomplish objectives. As NotPetya and other cyberattacks have demonstrated, attackers are often less concerned with controlling their tools than they are with achieving their intended effect. The defense is significantly more constrained. Its priority is defeating attacks while trying to keep networks operational, often at levels above 99 percent. This is a much higher bar. As new capabilities are developed, defenders’ fear of disrupting service may make them reluctant to deploy fully autonomous AI agents, placing them at a disadvantage to their adversaries. Defenders will have to weigh the potential risks of an attack against the impact of shutting down essential services. However, if the offense has fully leveraged AI, greater autonomy for defensive agents may be the only choice.
THE WORST-CASE SCENARIO
For this reason, a worst-case scenario involves fully autonomous AI cyber-agents. These capabilities differ from present-day autonomous attacks in that offensive cyber-agents would not be reliant on a set of explicit, preprogrammed instructions to guide their activity. Instead, they would be able to adjust their operations in real time, without additional human intervention, based upon the conditions and the opportunities they encounter. Conceivably, these agents could be given an objective without being told how to achieve it.
In such a scenario, two of the biggest concerns are speed and control. Theoretically, intelligent agents would be able to move through networks at machine speed. Defensive detection-and-response activities that relied upon human operators would be helpless to react. Perhaps even more concerning is the question of control: Can the effects of an attack be contained after launch? Research has already shown that machine-learning systems can operate in bizarre and unpredictable ways as a result of poorly specified objectives. Previous cyberattacks, starting with the Morris worm in the late 1980s, have occasionally had far greater reach and caused more damage than their creators ever intended. Intelligent agents could be even more devastating, devising novel attack vectors much the way AlphaZero developed new game strategies previously undiscovered by human players. Guarding against even more devastating attacks is just one reason to begin defensive preparations now. Another is that the development of an AI-enabled defensive agent that roams the network looking for illegitimate activity could finally start to tilt the field in favor of the defense.
A GROWING THREAT
Cyberattacks are already a significant geopolitical threat. Adding AI to this mix makes an already potent tool even more so. Therefore, it is important for network defenders and AI developers to begin working together to develop new defensive AI cyber-capabilities.
First, researchers need realistic data sets and network simulations to help the AI systems they build differentiate between threats and normal activity. Much of the available data relies upon public research and development dating from the late 1990s and is not representative of current threats. Armed with more current data sets and simulations, AI developers can begin to explore algorithmic approaches that could enable cyber-agents to detect incursions and, at a minimum, take rudimentary defensive measures.
Second, the federal government should prioritize research and development into a full spectrum of AI-enabled cyberdefenses. As part of these efforts, it should also significantly increase the use of cybersecurity competitions that focus on the development of new AI-enabled security tools. These competitions would differ from those that presently identify and reward the most capable human defender teams. Ideally, these contests would be public and the results would be broadly shared. Organizers should design competitions around specific cybersecurity challenges such as the detection of novel attacks or the identification of anomalous activity. Improvements in automated vulnerability discovery could make software more secure from the outset and find vulnerabilities in software that is already deployed.
Competitions should be organized with enough frequency to encourage continued innovation. The 2016 Cyber Grand Challenge undoubtedly helped improve automated vulnerability discovery, but it was held only once. Biyearly competitions with lucrative prizes and a path to government acquisition would incentivize sustained innovation and could uncover promising new techniques. Although Congress has authorized federal agencies to conduct these competitions, their use is sporadic and limited. Conducting more frequent competitions around specific cybersecurity challenges would encourage sustained innovation. The CASP competition for protein folding, which has been held every two years for over 25 years, offers a useful model. Sometimes strategic patience is needed for major breakthroughs.
The impact of uncontrolled cyberattacks is becoming ever more costly. It is past time for the United States to explore the potential for AI to improve its cyberdefenses to better protect critical infrastructure providers and state and local governments. There is little reason to believe that strategic competitors will not turn to AI-enabled attacks if traditional techniques lose their effectiveness. The stakes are high, and AI techniques are a double-edged sword. The United States must commit the resources to ensure that it is the defense that benefits.
19. Healing Washington and Beijing’s wounded relationship
Healing Washington and Beijing’s wounded relationship
In the nearly three weeks since the virtual meeting between U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping, there has been a clear improvement in the relationship, with China now cooperating in various areas despite previous demands that Washington first drop its antagonistic attitude.
Thus, when the United States announced plans to release 50 million barrels of oil from its strategic reserve in December to counter rising fuel prices, China announced that it, too, would join in this effort “based on its own needs” along with the United Kingdom, Japan, South Korea and India.
Antony Blinken, the U.S. Secretary of State, said Dec. 2 that the United States was working well with China and European partners in talks with Iran in Vienna.
Moreover, military-to-military exchanges are resuming. On Dec. 2, the Pentagon announced a working level virtual meeting with Chinese defense officials to discuss its recently released report “Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China.” The discussion was called “constructive.”
A meeting between Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and China’s defense minister, Wei Fenghe, as well as Xu Qiliang, vice chairman of the Central Military Commission, is being worked on.
So the summit that ostensibly achieved no breakthroughs and had no deliverables actually ended up restoring some normality to the bilateral relationship.
To a large extent, this change was attributable to Biden’s perseverance. He was the one who requested a meeting with Xi, just as he had initiated the phone call with the Chinese leader in September.
In fact, the Chinese attitude changed markedly after the Sept. 9 phone call.
When John Kerry visited China in early September, he ran into a brick wall. Senior Chinese officials met him, in person or virtually, including Vice Premier Han Zheng, a member of the Politburo Standing Committee, and Foreign Minister Wang Yi. But they refused to engage on the climate issue and told him that it was illogical to expect bilateral cooperation on climate when the United States was hostile to China on every other issue.
This Beijing message was sent to Washington through various channels, including during deputy secretary of state Wendy Sherman’s China visit in July. No doubt, it was delivered personally by Xi to Biden in their September phone call as well.
The atmosphere started to improve after that call. On Sept. 24, Huawei’s chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, detained in Canada on fraud charges in December 2018, was freed after the United States dropped its extradition request. Her release was seen by China as a response to their demand, and it helped to clear the air.
China’s change in attitude was clear even before the virtual summit. On Nov. 10, three days before the end of COP26, China and the U.S. issued a joint “Glasgow Declaration” on enhancing climate action in the 2020s. Climate cooperation had resumed.
Of course, there are still plenty of areas where the two countries disagree, such as human rights.
The Biden administration’s announcement of a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing winter Olympics is a sign that there remain deep-seated differences in the relationship. China says it will retaliate and one has to see what happens.
But there is now a floor under the relationship and it is no longer in free fall. And, since the relationship is characterized by competition, there is a ceiling as well. Since both sides acknowledge it to be the world’s most important bilateral relationship, it should be handled with care.
China still is reluctant to characterize the relationship as primarily competitive and prefers to describe it as one of “mutual respect, peaceful co-existence and win-win cooperation.”
In fact, China doesn’t accept Biden’s description of the world today as being characterized by a contest between democracy and autocracy, claiming that China itself is democratic. Interestingly, however, the Chinese Communist Party, in its November party plenum, issued a resolution describing the world today in not so different terms.
A resolution on the 100-year history of the party said: “Our continued success in adapting Marxism to the Chinese context and the needs of our times has enabled Marxism to take on a fresh face in the eyes of the world, and significantly shifted the worldwide historical evolution of and contest between the two different ideologies and social systems of socialism and capitalism in a way that favors socialism.”
So, in the Communist Party’s eyes, the contest is not between autocracy and democracy but between socialism and capitalism. That is a change in concept and terminology. In practice, capitalist countries tend to be democratic.
So China does see a global contest, with the capitalist United States on one side and socialist China on the other. And it believes that history is on its side.
Frank Ching is a U.S. journalist based in Hong Kong who frequently writes on China-related issues.
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20. Ranger Regiment: What we know about Army's new elite force (UK)
Ranger Regiment: What we know about Army's new elite force
Set to be at the heart of a Special Operations Brigade, the thousand-strong Ranger Regiment will be "open to anybody in the Armed Forces", according to the former Chief of the Defence Staff, General Sir Nick Carter.
Watch: Ranger Regiment – the Army's radical future soldiers.
The new Special Operations Brigade will replace the existing Specialised Infantry Group, and the Army hopes to be able to deploy it by 2022.
It will see soldiers take on roles usually carried out by Special Forces personnel, operating in high-threat environments to train, advise and accompany allies.
The Chief of the General Staff says the brigade will "build on the lessons that we've learnt from Iraq and Afghanistan about just how important it is to build up local and regional capacity".
It is part of a significant restructuring of the British Army following the publication of the Government's Defence Command Paper – which laid out plans for the Armed Forces over the coming decade.
Ranger Regiment: matching 'brainpower with firepower'
The new Ranger Regiment will be formed of four "all-arms" battalions, each of about 250 personnel.
To begin with, it will be 'seeded' from the four current Specialised Infantry Battalions: 1 SCOTS (which will become 1st Battalion, Ranger Regiment), 2 PWRR, 2 LANCS, and 4 RIFLES (4th Battalion, Ranger Regiment).
The new regiment will receive £120m over the next four years to equip it.
Watch: New Ranger Regiment will match 'brainpower with firepower'.
It will be routinely deployed around the world supporting allied nations in delivering defence and security.
Mozambique and Somalia have been reported as two of the countries under consideration for the first deployment.
Defence Secretary Ben Wallace has said the new regiment would be at the forefront of a more "active and engaged" Armed Forces, adding this month that its personnel could be sent to Africa or the Middle East, rather than just working with NATO allies, and will deploy in teams.
Mr Wallace added that money has already been spent on equipment to make the Rangers more "independent", with the new regiment expected to deploy without the usual logistical support given to others.
The Defence Secretary said the formation will be a "more selected cadre of people, with better equipment", and also confirmed one of the Ranger battalions will be based in Northern Ireland.
The Chief of the General Staff, General Sir Mark Carleton-Smith, meanwhile, has said previously the Ranger Regiment will be the "vanguard of the Army's global footprint", adding that it will be: "Matching brainpower with firepower, data and software with hardware."
In time the Special Operations Brigade will select personnel from across the Army.
Everyone serving in the Ranger Regiment will wear a metal cap badge, inspired by a peregrine falcon, according to the British military, due to the bird's loyalty and ability to operate in all environments.
Meanwhile, the regiment's beret and stable belt will be gunmetal grey, in homage to the peregrine falcon's colour.
According to the Defence Command Paper, the Ranger Regiment "will be aligned with the new divisions of infantry".
"They will be able to operate in complex, high-threat environments, taking on some tasks traditionally done by Special Forces," the document continues.
"This work will involve deterring adversaries and contributing to collective deterrence by training, advising and, if necessary, accompanying partners."
A member of 4 RIFLES mentoring Iraqi forces (Picture: MOD).
Selection Process
The process will be as follows:
Cadre Course – A two-week assessment that selected individuals from throughout the entire Army can tackle, judging their aptitude from the start.
Ranger Course – The second stage sends successful Cadre Course applicants on a six-week course. This could take place in a number of places, including outside the UK.
Those who pass through the Ranger Course then join a Ranger battalion for eight months of training.
This includes fundamental and mission-specific skills training and special role training.
There is also operational partner training at this stage, which will prepare personnel for interaction with foreign UK partners (training, advising and, if necessary, accompanying them).
All personnel who are moving from the Army's Specialised Infantry Battalions to form the Ranger Regiment's 'all arms' battalions will have passed the Cadre Course and Ranger Course already.
Those who fail to pass the courses will return to their cap badges.
New Ranger Regiment cap badge (Picture: British Army).
History of the 'Rangers'
According to the British Army, the Ranger Regiment's name comes from an 18th Century unit that saw action in North America, using "irregular tactics".
The first Ranger groupings fought in the French and Indian War, between 1754 and 1763, including the unit of Robert Rogers, who wrote '28 Rules of Ranging'.
These early units specialised in "unconventional warfare", such as forest ranging, and environments usually inaccessible to other forces, as well as carrying out reconnaissance roles.
Rangers were also used by both sides during the American War of Independence, with Robert Rogers' unit eventually evolving into a British Army regiment, the Queen's Rangers.
Watch: Ranger Regiment – could the new Army unit's first mission be in East Africa?
Following that conflict and loss of the North American colonies, the British Army was without a suitable environment to employ a ranger unit, and the ranging capability ceased to exist in the same way.
In 1800, the Experimental Rifle Corps was formed, carrying some of the skills deployed in North America.
According to the Army, regiments which incorporated the 'Ranger' name over the following decades included: Central London Rangers, The Connaught Rangers, The Royal Irish Rangers, and The Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry.
Today, a 'Ranger' is a term used to describe a Royal Irish Regiment soldier, although the term's meaning differs from the original "unconventional warfare" definition.
21. China trolls Biden summit with Harry Potter jokes and claims to be a democracy
Is the CCP feeling threatened?
China trolls Biden summit with Harry Potter jokes and claims to be a democracy
Does U.S.-style democracy “realize dreams or create nightmares?” It appears to have turned evil like Voldemort, the dark wizard of the Harry Potter franchise. Young President Biden must have eaten too much KFC and McDonald’s, leading to a belief that democracy is like a fast-food chain with the United States supplying the ingredients.
These are among the odd arguments and analogies deployed in recent days during a Chinese Communist Party propaganda blitz to claim that China is as much a democracy as the United States. After China was excluded — along with Russia and other nations deemed autocratic — from Biden’s “Summit for Democracy” this week, Chinese state media, think tanks and officials have lined up to take potshots at the event.
But aside from mudslinging and off-color humor, the campaign also betrays Beijing’s desire to redefine international norms and present its controlling, one-party political system as not just legitimate but ideologically superior to liberal multiparty democracies.
A decade ago, China’s ambition to change the world’s political structures was less clear, but “now I think they genuinely do want to change the world on an ideological level,” said Charles Parton, an associate fellow at the Council on Geostrategy, a British think tank.
The former British diplomat added that the propaganda messages may appear ineffective to Western observers, but they will strike a chord with Beijing’s intended domestic audience and help Chinese leader Xi Jinping legitimize his monopoly on power.
“It’s saying to the Chinese people that ‘We are the best,’ ” Parton said. “The summit is the trigger but more generally China is keen to diminish the ideological power of the U.S. because doing so increases its own.”
The party’s claim to embody a form of democracy is not new. Being a “people’s democratic dictatorship” is written into the constitution of the People’s Republic. But China’s recent defense of its democratic credentials has been unusually direct.
“It’s presented more confidently and much more definitively as a different kind of system and as a rejection of Western-style democracy,” said Mary Gallagher, director of the International Institute at the University of Michigan.
In recent years, the party has preferred to highlight its Marxist roots and talk about the unique nature of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” and its “scientific” approach to governance. Xi has repeatedly declared that liberal multiparty democracy will never work in China.
Global rankings of national democratic institutions regularly label China as an autocracy. The V-Dem Institute, based at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, ranked China 174th out of 179 countries on its liberal democracy index in 2020. (In the same year, the United States fell to 31st place from 20th in 2016 and 3rd in 2012.)
A white paper released over the weekend by the State Council Information Office, titled “China: Democracy That Works,” suggested that Xi’s recently coined “whole-process people’s democracy” was a legitimate inheritor of the ancient Greek ideal of citizen rule.
The document argues that what matters isn’t any particular process, such as direct leadership elections, but rather the outcome — meeting the people’s needs. Among examples it listed as proof that China’s version of democracy works is “promoting political stability, unity and vitality” and halting the spread of the coronavirus.
One-party rule, rather than being a hindrance to democratization, is its guarantor. “It is no easy job for a country as big as China to fully represent and address the concerns of its 1.4 billion people. It must have a robust and centralized leadership,” the paper stated.
The drier descriptions in official documents have been mixed with colorful commentaries from state media. One by Xinhua News Agency likened the United States to Voldemort — and, by implication, the Chinese Communist Party to Harry Potter — to cast shade on U.S.-style democracy.
“Just like young Voldemort was a star of the wizarding world in his youth, American-style democracy’s early development was an innovation,” the article said. “But just as Voldemort went down an evil path, so has American-style democracy over time gradually changed and decayed.”
The weakening of democratic norms in the United States has emboldened Beijing’s propagandists to be more determined to present the party as building a coherent and superior system of governance.
“The U.S. has long been an example — bad or good — that China pays close attention to,” said Gallagher of the University of Michigan. “If the U.S. struggles in the next few national elections, that will be important in deciding how China moves forward with this re-articulation of its own political system.”
To deflect criticism in multilateral forums, Beijing has increasingly reappropriated contested ideas such as human rights and justified its actions by supplying alternative models.
This tactic, which may appear like Orwellian doublespeak to critics, has allowed Beijing to make progress in weaponizing such rhetoric at the United Nations, where it often rebuffs liberal democracies’ concerns by collecting signatures, votes and statements from partner nations.
“What started as a limited, defensive argument has now morphed into a more assertive — you could say aggressive — position that makes sweeping claims about why the Chinese mode of governance is superior,” said Eva Pils, a scholar at King’s College London who studies Chinese law.
After China and Russia’s ambassadors to the United States jointly opposed the democracy summit as the product of a “Cold War mentality,” Pakistan, one of China’s closest diplomatic and military partners, announced on Wednesday that it would not take up an invitation to join.
The extent to which China wants to revise the existing international order is a live debate, but “I would read more recent moves as an indication that the goal is to build a countervailing sphere of influence,” rather than merely weaken liberal principles, Pils said.
Lyric Li in Seoul and Pei Lin Wu in Taipei contributed to this report.
22. At the Democracy Summit, Biden Bungles Again
Conclusion:
In the end, as American Enterprise Institute and Johns Hopkins University scholar Hal Brands has argued, the U.S. will need to fashion a containment policy for China as it did for the Soviet Union. It faces this challenge at a time when liberal democracy is threatened not only by old-fashioned dictators, but also by populist strongmen whose help America may need against Beijing. Navigating this complex world requires clarity and sophistication. Washington will need to do better than Mr. Biden’s bungled summit.
At the Democracy Summit, Biden Bungles Again
How did Pakistan and Congo pass muster when Singapore and Hungary were found wanting?
By
Sadanand Dhume
Dec. 9, 2021 6:18 pm ET
President Biden speaks at the virtual Summit for Democracy from the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington, Dec. 9.
Photo: Al Drago/Bloomberg News
President Biden’s democracy summit failed before it even began.
In virtual meetings on Thursday and Friday, activists and business groups and representatives from some 110 nations are discussing ways to guard against authoritarianism, fight corruption, and promote human rights. “Leaders will be encouraged to announce specific actions and commitments to meaningful internal reforms and international initiatives that advance the Summit’s goals,” the State Department says. There will be another summit next year for countries to report progress.
Speaking generally, it’s prudent for America to champion democracy. China and the U.S. are locked in a contest that will shape the globe. Beijing is a formidable authoritarian rival whose economic success and technological prowess threaten democracy in a way not seen since the end of the Cold War. The world’s most powerful democracy should rally the forces of freedom.
You have to ignore history to believe that America can contain China by adopting a hard-bitten realism that’s indifferent to ideology. In the 20th century, U.S. leaders understood that Soviet ideas as well as armaments posed a threat to the world. America didn’t win the Cold War by abandoning its values, but by blending idealism and realism in foreign policy.
And those who claim that the U.S. is too flawed to trumpet liberty ought to try living as dissidents in Beijing or Moscow, or in most of the 85 or so nations not invited to the summit. American democracy may not be perfect, but it has delivered more for its people than any other system of government.
The real problem—as with much of Mr. Biden’s foreign policy—lies in the summit’s clumsy execution. Instead of promoting democratic values, this meeting risks alienating friends and whitewashing the reputation of thugs. Some of the summit’s bizarre inclusions (Pakistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo) and questionable exclusions (Sri Lanka, Singapore) suggest confusion rather than coherence.
The Biden administration also seems not to have grasped a central difference from the Cold War: Many of the strongmen most responsible for eroding liberal democracy are popular in their home countries. Democratic backsliding in places like the Philippines and India won’t be stopped with finger wagging or sanctions. But the U.S. can’t simply ignore that President Rodrigo Duterte has undermined rule of law by backing death squads, or that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has diminished press freedom, attacked civil society and eroded minority rights. And it’s shortsighted to allow U.S. domestic politics to taint the summit—as seems to be the case with the pointed exclusion of Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who is friendly with President Trump.
Start with the list of invitees. Freedom House classifies only 77 of the invited nations as free. Thirty-one are partly free. Three—Iraq, Angola and Congo—aren’t free at all. According to the Swedish V-Dem Institute, only 80 of the invitees are either liberal democracies that protect both individual rights and elections or electoral democracies that at least ensure fully fair elections. Fourteen invitees are electoral autocracies, only one notch above the lowest ranking—closed autocracies. Of the 10 nations that V-Dem identifies as having deteriorated the most between 2010 and 2020, half managed to snag invitations to the summit: Poland, Brazil, Serbia, India and Mauritius.
Asia in particular illustrates the perils of Mr. Biden’s incoherent approach to the summit. With a Freedom House score of 37, Pakistan is the lowest-ranked Asian nation invited to the summit. Sri Lanka (56) and Singapore (48) did better but got snubbed.
In Pakistan, the military has long dominated politics. Government critics get roughed up by thugs in plain clothes or forced into exile. Baloch nationalists and Pashtun separatists often end up disappeared or dead. Harsh blasphemy laws ensure that religious minorities live in terror. Last week a mob in the city of Sialkot beat to death and burned the corpse of a Sri Lankan Christian factory manager accused of “blasphemy” against the prophet Muhammad. On Wednesday Islamabad, a close Chinese ally, snubbed Mr. Biden by declining his invitation.
No list of invitees could please everyone. Purists would like to see a more exclusive list. Why allow the likes of Messrs. Duterte and Modi to shore up their democratic credentials? (Short answer: Because we need their help against China.) At the same time, excluding countries like Singapore, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh only nudges these nations toward Beijing. And whatever you may think of Mr. Orban, nobody could argue seriously that Hungary is less democratic than Iraq or Angola.
In the end, as American Enterprise Institute and Johns Hopkins University scholar Hal Brands has argued, the U.S. will need to fashion a containment policy for China as it did for the Soviet Union. It faces this challenge at a time when liberal democracy is threatened not only by old-fashioned dictators, but also by populist strongmen whose help America may need against Beijing. Navigating this complex world requires clarity and sophistication. Washington will need to do better than Mr. Biden’s bungled summit.
Appeared in the December 10, 2021, print edition.
About this article
“East is East” explores the most important news from India and South Asia with a focus on the region’s domestic politics, economics and geopolitics. It appears every other week on Thursday evenings.
Sadanand Dhume writes a biweekly column on India and South Asia for WSJ.com. He focuses on the region’s politics, economics and foreign policy.
Mr. Dhume is also a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. Previously he worked as the New Delhi bureau chief of the Far Eastern Economic Review (FEER), and as Indonesia correspondent for FEER and The Wall Street Journal Asia.
Mr. Dhume is the author of “My Friend the Fanatic: Travels with a Radical Islamist,” (Skyhorse Publishing, 2009), which charts the rise of the radical Islamist movement in Indonesia. His next book will look at India’s transformation since the election of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2014.
Mr. Dhume holds a bachelor’s degree in sociology from the University of Delhi, a master’s degree in international relations from Princeton University and a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University. He lives in Washington, D.C. with his wife, and travels frequently to India.
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23. Four Ways the U.S. Can Keep Putin From Invading Ukraine
Four Ways the U.S. Can Keep Putin From Invading Ukraine
The Russian leader despises having Western troops on his borders. He needs to know that escalation will bring a huge increase in American forces and more nations into NATO.
December 10, 2021, 3:00 AM EST
When I became the supreme military commander at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 2009, the alliance was focused on the war in Afghanistan. But one of the first senior delegations to visit me came to discuss Russia: the military chiefs of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
I’ll never forget the tone in their voices as they described the malevolence of Russian President Vladimir Putin. They had the insiders’ view, as they had ascended through the ranks while their countries were part of the Soviet Union.
The three laid out a persuasive case that Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia was a dress rehearsal for further operations against democracies bordering Russia. So we rewrote the alliance’s war plans for dealing with that possibility, significantly increasing the level of U.S. support for Eastern Europe.
At the time, I felt Ukraine was a likely target — a close partner to NATO, but not an actual member. And in 2014, Putin’s military moved in and seized Crimea.
Seven years later, Putin is again setting in place the forces to strike Ukraine, as he seeks to fully sever its relationship with the West. What are the best tools the U.S. and European democracies can use to deter him?
The first is intelligence and strategic communications. By gathering information from all sources (human, electronic, etc.), laying it out coherently and publicizing it globally, Washington can aim to rally a coalition intent on new and stronger punishments.
While the U.S. government cannot reveal sources and methods, it can provide detailed, unclassified briefings, perhaps by Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin or Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence. Photos of Russian forces in the field and heavy equipment are worth a thousand words.
Next is cyberwarfare. The National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command are surely probing the likely command-and-control systems of a Russian invasion force. But total secrecy isn’t always the best approach: Ensuring the Russians can “see” American efforts moving through that domain, without revealing everything the U.S. can and will do, should help them understand that an invasion will not be a layup. The Russians used cyberattacks very effectively in the earlier assaults on Georgia and Ukraine; they need to know that their advantage there has been blunted.
A third tool is economic. Yes, previous sanctions have not dissuaded the Russian leader. But in a two-hour discussion with Putin on Tuesday, Biden conveyed some of the “strong economic and other measures” in the event of military escalation.
These should include additional targeted steps by all Western democracies against the highest members of Putin’s inner circle; tighter sanctions on Russia’s state-owned banks and its oil and gas sector (recognizing the difficulty of all this given the European dependence on Russian energy); and far broader secondary sanctions against companies doing business in Russia — which would begin to cut Putin off from the global economy.
Finally, the administration must consider the so-called nuclear option: disconnecting Russia from the Swift international payment system used by banks around the world, a penalty that helped devastate Iran’s economy a decade ago.
In terms of aiding the Ukrainian military, the Pentagon is providing Biden with a significant menu: defensive but lethal missile systems that can stop tanks; motorized artillery and ground transports for troops; advanced drones with strike capability; basic ammunition; and other logistical support.
The Pentagon could even transfer a missile defense system to counter Russian surface-to-surface weapons. All this must be combined with sufficient U.S. trainers and strategic advisers to assist Ukrainian military planners as they assess contingencies.
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Finally, Putin despises the idea of Western troops stationed close to Russia. He is seeking security guarantees, including a pledge by NATO not to enlarge eastward, as the price of de-escalation. The West shouldn’t buy it: He should be told that an invasion of Ukraine would have the opposite effect, with a dramatic increase American forces in the Baltics, Poland, Romania and Bulgaria. A flotilla of U.S. Navy Arleigh Burke-class destroyers currently stationed in Rota, Spain, could be redeployed to Greece and begin regular operational cruises into the Black Sea.
Putin has moved beyond saber-rattling, even if the likelihood of his launching an attack before the end of the year seems relatively low. He has invaded his democratic neighbors twice in the past 13 years. Letting him get away with it again could set the international system back decades.
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