Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

“[Independence Day] will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more. You will think me transported with Enthusiasm but I am not. I am well aware of the Toil and Blood and Treasure, that it will cost Us to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these States. Yet through all the Gloom I can see the Rays of ravishing Light and Glory. I can see that the End is more than worth all the Means. And that Posterity will tryumph in that Days Transaction, even altho We should rue it, which I trust in God We shall not.”
- John Adams, The Letters of John and Abigail Adams

“...in any society, leaders who are not willing to make sacrifices aren't leaders, they're opportunists, and opportunists rarely have the common good in mind. They're easy to spot, though: opportunists lie reflexively, blame others for failures, and are unapologetic cowards. Wealthy nations might survive that kind of leadership, but insurgencies and uprisings probably won't: their margins simply aren't big enough. A prerequisite for any such group would seem to be leaders that--like their followers--are prepared to die for the cause.”
- Sebastian Junger, Freedom

“As Mankind becomes more liberal, they will be more apt to allow that all those who conduct themselves as worthy members of the community are equally entitled to the protections of civil government. I hope ever to see America among the foremost nations of justice and liberality.” 
– George Washington


1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, JULY 3 (Putin's War)
2. China’s rise pushes Asia-Pacific nations to embrace Nato
3. Nuclear question arises in East Asia as invasion of Ukraine, US-China tensions continue
4. Is Using Nuclear Weapons Still Taboo?
5. The Best Evidence of a Future Ukrainian Victory is the Country’s Valiant Past: Part One
6. Ukrainian Military Performance and Outlook
7. CRS Report: Ukrainian Military Performance and Outlook
8. An American’s Murky Path From Russian Propagandist to Jan. 6
9. Does Putin’s War Mark a New Period in History?
10. The Art of the Arms Race
11. British Army hit by cyberattack as Twitter and YouTube accounts hacked
12. Only 12 Army Rangers who served in World War II are still alive, and they just received Congress' highest award for achievement
13. The few, the proud, the drunk: Meet America’s revolutionary yet ‘ungentlemanlike’ troops of 1776
14. The Strategy of the Mind: Maoism and Culture War in the West
15. Wary of China threat, Taiwanese join Ukraine’s fight against Russia
16. Thinking About the Unthinkable in Ukraine - What Happens If Putin Goes Nuclear?
17. In Ukraine, U.S. Veterans Step In Where the Military Will Not
18. Why America’s Far Right and Far Left Have Aligned Against Helping Ukraine
19. Ukraine’s moral waters get muddier and bloodier
20. Ukrainian Producers Launch Documentary ‘Against All Odds’ About Russian Invasion





1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, JULY 3 (Putin's War)



RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, JULY 3
Jul 3, 2022 - Press ISW

Kateryna Stepanenko, George Barros, Grace Mappes, and Frederick W. Kagan
July 3, 7:45 pm ET
Click here to see ISW's interactive map of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This map is updated daily alongside the static maps present in this report.
Russian forces have likely secured the Luhansk Oblast border, although pockets of Ukrainian resistance may remain in and around Lysychansk. Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu announced that Russian forces have captured Luhansk Oblast on July 3, after seizing Lysychansk and settlements on the Luhansk Oblast administrative border.[1] The Ukrainian General Staff also announced that Ukrainian forces withdrew from Lysychansk to avoid personnel losses.[2] Russian forces have likely not fully cleared Lysychansk and Luhansk Oblast as of July 3, despite Shoigu’s announcement. The Russian Defense Ministry stated that Russian forces are still fighting within Lysychansk to defeat remaining encircled Ukrainian forces, but the Ukrainian withdrawal means that Russian forces will almost certainly complete their clearing operations relatively quickly.[3]
Russian forces will likely next advance on Siversk, though they could launch more significant attacks on Bakhmut or Slovyansk instead or at the same time. Ukrainian forces will likely continue their fighting withdrawal toward the E40 highway that runs from Slovyansk through Bakhmut toward Debaltseve. It is unclear whether they will choose to defend around Siversk at this time.
Two very senior Russian commanders are reportedly responsible for the tactical activities around Lysychansk. Commander of the Central Military District Colonel General Aleksandr Lapin and Commander of the Russian Aerospace Forces Army General Sergey Suvorikin (who also commands Russia’s “southern” group of troops in Ukraine) have been responsible for securing Lysychansk and the area to the west of it respectively.[4] The involvement of two such senior officers in the same undertaking in a small part of the front is remarkable and likely indicates the significance that Russian President Vladimir Putin has attributed to securing Lysychansk and the Luhansk Oblast border as well as his lack of confidence in more junior officers to do the job.
Ukrainian forces likely used US-provided HIMARS rocket artillery systems to strike a Russian ammunition depot at the Melitopol airfield on July 3. Melitopol Mayor Ivan Fedorov reported that Ukrainian forces launched two strikes on one of the four Russian depots in Melitopol.[5] Russian Telegram channel Rybar released footage of a large cloud of smoke over the city, and Russian-appointed Melitopol Governor Yevhen Balytskyi falsely claimed that Ukrainian forces aimed to strike residential buildings, but instead hit areas around the airfield.[6]
The Kremlin likely seeks to expand Russian state control over private Russian companies that support elements of Russia’s military industrial base. The Ukrainian Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) reported on July 3 that the Russian government’s inability to pay Russian firms supporting Russia’s war in Ukraine is degrading Russia’s ability to repair damaged vehicles. The GUR reported that the directors of Russian military vehicle repair centers are not accepting new Russian equipment for repair because the Russian military has not paid these centers for previous work.[7] Recently proposed Russian legislation suggests that Kremlin leadership shares GUR’s assessment. Russian legislators in the Russian State Duma submitted a bill on June 30 that would empower the Kremlin to introduce “special measures in the economic sphere” enabling the Russian government to force private Russian companies to provide supplies for Russian military operations.[8] The bill prohibits Russian businesses from refusing to fulfil Russian government procurement orders connected to Russian military operations.
Key Takeaways
  • Russian forces seized the remaining territory between Lysychansk and Luhansk Oblast’s administrative borders on July 3.
  • Russian forces launched assaults northeast of Bakhmut and north of Slovyansk but did not secure new territorial gains.
  • Russian forces conducted extensive artillery attacks in the western part of the Southern Axis likely to disrupt Ukrainian counteroffensives.
  • The Kremlin continued to set conditions for potential Russian annexation of proxy republics.
  • Ukrainian partisans reportedly derailed a Russian armored train carrying ammunition near Melitopol on July 2.

We do not report in detail on Russian war crimes because those activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting. We will continue to evaluate and report on the effects of these criminal activities on the Ukrainian military and population and specifically on combat in Ukrainian urban areas. We utterly condemn these Russian violations of the laws of armed conflict, Geneva Conventions, and humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports.
  • Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine (comprised of one subordinate and three supporting efforts);
  • Subordinate Main Effort—Encirclement of Ukrainian troops in the cauldron between Izyum and Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts
  • Supporting Effort 1—Kharkiv City
  • Supporting Effort 2—Southern Axis
  • Mobilization and force generation efforts
  • Activities in Russian-occupied Areas
Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine
Subordinate Main Effort—Southern Kharkiv, Donetsk, Luhansk Oblasts (Russian objective: Encircle Ukrainian forces in Eastern Ukraine and capture the entirety of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, the claimed territory of Russia’s proxies in Donbas)
Russian forces captured Luhansk Oblast’s administrative borders on July 3 following the Ukrainian withdrawal from Lysychansk and settlements in its vicinity. Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu claimed that Russian forces seized Lysychansk, Bilohorivka, Novodruzhensk, and Maloryazantseve on July 2, capturing the remaining salient around Lysychansk along the Luhansk Oblast boundary.[9] The Russian Defense Ministry added that Russian forces are still fighting encircled Ukrainian forces within Lysychansk as of July 3.[10] The Ukrainian General Staff confirmed that Ukrainian forces deliberately withdrew from Lysychansk, citing lack of equipment and concern over the loss of life.[11] Geolocated footage showed Russian forces casually walking around Bilohorivka on July 3, which further suggests that Ukrainian forces withdrew from settlements on the Luhansk Oblast border just west of Lysychansk.[12] The Ukrainian General Staff also confirmed that Russian forces captured Zolotarivka and are securing positions around Verkhnokamyanka, both just south of Bilohorivka.[13]

Russian forces launched assaults northeast of Bakhmut in an effort to capture the remaining settlements along the Luhansk Oblast administrative borders. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces launched unsuccessful assaults from Nyrokove on Berestove, indicating that Russian forces established control over Nyrkove on the Luhansk Oblast border.[14] Russian forces also reportedly conducted reconnaissance-in-force operations in the Vasylivka-Berestove direction and attempted unsuccessful offensive operations west of Mykolaivka and Vovchoyarivka.[15] Russian Telegram channel Rybar posted footage reportedly captured by Wagner Group units in Klynove (approximately 12km southeast of Bakhmut) that would indicate that Russian forces are attempting to secure positions along the E40 Slovyansk-Bakhmut highway, although ISW is unable to verify the footage.[16]

Russian forces attacked settlements north of Slovyansk but did not secure new territorial gains on July 3. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian assaults near Mazanivka and on Dolyna from Pasivka (northeast of the E40).[17] The Ukrainian General Staff noted that Russian forces are using unspecified electronic warfare systems in the areas north of Slovyansk.[18] Pro-Russian military expert Boris Rozhin claimed that Russian forces are also engaged in positional battles in Velyka Komyshuvakha and Kurlka, southwest of Izyum, which would suggest that Russian forces are attempting to repel Ukrainian counterattacks in the area, although ISW is unable to verify this assertion.[19] Slovyansk Mayor Vadym Lyakh and Russian sources reported that Russian forces are heavily shelling Slovyansk.[20]
Russian forces are attempting to improve their tactical positions around Avdiivka, and are continuing to shell and launch airstrikes on Ukrainian positions in the area.[21] Rozhin claimed that Russian forces are fighting near the N20 Avdiivka-Konstantynivka highway, and the Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces are trying to improve tactical positions around Spartak.[22]

Supporting Effort #1—Kharkiv City (Russian objective: Defend ground lines of communication (GLOCs) to Izyum and prevent Ukrainian forces from reaching the Russian border)
Russian forces did not make any territorial gains northwest of Kharkiv City on July 3. Ukrainian sources reported that Ukrainian forces repelled a Russian attack on Prudyanka along the T2117 highway, and that Russian forces northwest of Kharkiv City otherwise focused on maintaining their current positions.[23] Russian forces continued shelling civilian and military infrastructure facilities in Kharkiv City and the surrounding settlements, especially along the E105 and T2117 highways leading to Kharkiv City.[24]

Supporting Effort #2—Southern Axis (Russian objective: Defend Kherson and Zaporizhia Oblasts against Ukrainian counterattacks)
Russian forces are continuing to take defensive measures along the Southern Axis, likely in an effort to repel Ukrainian counteroffensives. Ukraine’s General Staff reported on July 3 that Russian forces conducted “systematic” tube and rocket artillery strikes to prevent Ukrainian units' advances.[25] NASA’s Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS) remotely sensed data showed abnormally high numbers of fires along the Mykolaiv-Kherson Oblast frontline on July 3, notably near Snihurivka, Zasillia, Kopani - Zelenyi Hai, and Tavriiske, supporting the Ukrainian General Staff’s report.[26] These locations are plausible bases for a possible Ukrainian counteroffensive. Ukraine’s Operational Command South reported on July 2 that Ukrainian forces repelled a Russian reconnaissance-in-force in the direction of Ivanivka in northwestern Kherson Oblast.[27] Odesa Oblast Military Administration Spokesperson Serhiy Bratchuk also noted that Russian forces began accumulating military equipment in downtown Kherson City and Verhniy Rogachyk (eastern Kherson Oblast).[28]


[Source: NASA’s Fire Information for Resource Management System, July 3]

[Source: NASA’s Fire Information for Resource Management System, July 3]

[Source: NASA’s Fire Information for Resource Management System, July 3]
Ukrainian combat aviation is reportedly still active in Kherson Oblast as of July 2. Ukraine’s Operational Command South reported that Ukrainian fixed and rotary wing aircraft conducted five strikes against Russian ammunition depots and force concentrations and claimed the destruction of two Russian ammunition depots in Chornobayivka and Snihurivka.[29] Russian forces continued conducting missile strikes against Kherson and Mykolaiv Oblasts on July 2 - 3.[30]
Mobilization and force generation efforts (Russian objective: Expand combat power without conducting general mobilization)
Nothing significant to report.
Activity in Russian-occupied Areas (Russian objective: consolidate administrative control of occupied areas; set conditions for potential annexation into the Russian Federation or some other future political arrangement of Moscow’s choosing)
The Kremlin continued to set conditions for potential Russian annexation of proxy republics on July 3. Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) Head Denis Pushilin announced that United Russia Party Secretary of the General Council Andrey Turchak and party representatives established a legal aid center in Donetsk City.[31] Pushilin noted that the legal aid center will provide DNR residents assistance with education, legal documents, and registration for social benefits. Pushilin and Turchak also handed out Russian passports to DNR residents.[32] The Kremlin is likely attempting to integrate proxy legal and governmental structures into the Russian framework.
Ukrainian partisans reportedly derailed a Russian armored train carrying ammunition near Melitopol on July 2.[33] Kremlin-sponsored outlet RIA Novosti acknowledged that the train derailed around Yakymivka, but claimed that the incident was an accident.[34] Ukrainian partisans previously targeted Russian armored trains and locomotives in Melitopol in late April and mid-May.[35]
[7] https://gur.gov dot ua/content/oboronni-pidpryiemstva-rosii-vidmovliaiutsia-remontuvaty-poshkodzhenu-boiovu-tekhniku-okupantiv.html
[8] https://sozd.duma.gov dot ru/bill/155680-8#bh_histras ; https://t.me/bazabazon/12200
[33] https://sprotyv.mod.gov dot ua/2022/07/03/partyzany-pid-melitopolem-vidpravyly-pid-ukis-rosijskyj-bronepoyizd/; https://t.me/riamelitopol/60204; https://www.facebook.com/100001701408811/videos/2172478259628933/RIA


2. China’s rise pushes Asia-Pacific nations to embrace Nato

Excerpts:

Even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, concerns about how to contain China’s military ambitions had prompted a flurry of collective security arrangements in Asia. These include the Quad, which groups the US, Japan, Australia and India, and the Aukus pact, under which the UK and the US will help Australia acquire nuclear-powered submarines.

Those multilateral security networks and existing bilateral defence pacts have also been complemented by regional economic initiatives such as the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, unveiled recently by Biden.

Stephen Nagy, senior associate professor at the International Christian University in Tokyo, said there would be limits to co-operation between Nato and its new partners.

Nato would welcome diplomatic and financial help to counter Russia, but it would not want to commit any of its resources to the Indo-Pacific and was unlikely to view nations in the region as equal partners, Nagy said.




China’s rise pushes Asia-Pacific nations to embrace Nato
North Atlantic alliance to expand co-operation with Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand
Financial Times · by Kana Inagaki · July 3, 2022
When Nato leaders gathered in Madrid this week they were joined by heads of government from four nations far beyond the usual geographic scope of the transatlantic alliance: Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand.
The unprecedented participation of the four US allies — and their agreement to co-operate with Nato on cyber defence and maritime security — underline their alarm both at Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the growing might of an increasingly assertive China.
Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida, who interrupted a crucial election campaign for the summit, said the move showed leaders realised the security of Europe and Indo-Pacific was “inseparable”.
“I feel a strong sense of crisis that Ukraine may be East Asia tomorrow,” Kishida said, adding that the Asia-Pacific partners should in future “participate in Nato summits on a regular basis”.
Japan’s prime minister Fumio Kishida takes part in a meeting during the first day of the Nato Summit at IFEMA Convention Center in Madrid, Spain, June 29 2022 © Lavandeira Jr/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock
Nato member states share their new partners’ anxiety about Beijing’s intentions. At the summit, the alliance formally defined China for the first time as “a challenge” in its strategic concept for the next decade.
The closer ties between Nato and the Asia-Pacific countries have prompted alarm in Beijing.
“Now Nato has extended its tentacles to the Asia-Pacific,” said Zhao Lijian, Chinese foreign minister spokesperson, adding that attempts to undermine peace and stability in the region were “bound to fail”.
Beijing has repeatedly warned against the creation in Asia of any Nato-like military bloc, a prospect that security experts said was very unlikely since countries in the region have highly varied interests and strong economic ties with China.
But the deeper engagement between Nato and the four Asia-Pacific nations is driven by concern that separate alliances with the US alone are no longer sufficient to ensure their security. Their confidence in Washington was undermined by the “America First” approach of former president Donald Trump, who threatened to remove US troops from Japan and South Korea.
And Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and fears that China could make a similar move on Taiwan have suggested a need for multiple options to strengthen deterrence.
“It would complicate calculations for China if they need to think about not only the alliance with the US, but also the 30 members belonging to Nato,” said Yoshikazu Hirose, an expert on the alliance at the National Defense Academy in Japan.
One US official said Washington had pushed for Japan and the other three nations to attend Nato, as part of president Joe Biden’s administration’s strategy of building and expanding coalitions of like-minded allies to counter China.
The US official said Japan wanted to expand and diversify its security ties as an insurance policy to protect itself from China in case the 2024 US election produced a president who was weaker on the alliance with Tokyo. “Japan is trying to build capacity outside of its relationship with the US,” he said.
Christopher Johnstone, a Japan expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a US think-tank, said Kishida in particular felt a keen sense of threat because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and wanted Europe and Nato to be more attuned to the challenge from China.
Kishida had also encouraged UK and German naval deployments to the Indo-Pacific over the past year, said Johnstone, who until recently was in charge of Japan policy at the National Security Council. “It fits a larger pattern of diversifying relations,” he said.
At the Madrid summit, Anthony Albanese, who was elected as prime minister of Australia in May, dismissed accusations that Nato and its partners had constructed an “imaginary foe” in the form of China.
Albanese pointed to Beijing’s “no limits” partnership with Russia and its refusal to condemn the invasion of Ukraine. “China must look at what is happening and look at the resolve that is there from throughout the world and should be condemning Russia’s actions,” he said.
Anthony Albanese © Lukas Coch/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock
South Korea’s president Yoon Suk-Yeol, who made his international debut at the summit, pledged his country would play a bigger security role. “The co-operative relationship between South Korea and Nato will become a cornerstone for solidarity,” Yoon said.
On the summit sidelines, Yoon also met with Kishida and Biden for the countries’ first trilateral meeting in nearly five years. The South Korean leader used the occasion to signal willingness to repair ties with Japan that have been badly strained by disputes over historical issues and trade.
Even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, concerns about how to contain China’s military ambitions had prompted a flurry of collective security arrangements in Asia. These include the Quad, which groups the US, Japan, Australia and India, and the Aukus pact, under which the UK and the US will help Australia acquire nuclear-powered submarines.
Those multilateral security networks and existing bilateral defence pacts have also been complemented by regional economic initiatives such as the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, unveiled recently by Biden.
Stephen Nagy, senior associate professor at the International Christian University in Tokyo, said there would be limits to co-operation between Nato and its new partners.
Nato would welcome diplomatic and financial help to counter Russia, but it would not want to commit any of its resources to the Indo-Pacific and was unlikely to view nations in the region as equal partners, Nagy said.
Financial Times · by Kana Inagaki · July 3, 2022



3. Nuclear question arises in East Asia as invasion of Ukraine, US-China tensions continue

Nuclear question arises in East Asia as invasion of Ukraine, US-China tensions continue
Worries over a Taiwan contingency, North Korea and an assertive China have led South Korea and Japan to contemplate their security responses. The programme When Titans Clash takes stock of what’s at play in East Asia.
TOKYO and SEOUL: He was 11 months old when the United States dropped an atomic bomb over Hiroshima, Japan on August 6, 1945. Each year on the anniversary of the bombing, Yasuhiro Asaeda will head to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial.
His hope is that there will be no repeat of the tragedy. On its 75th anniversary, the survivor of the bombing told The Associated Press: “If the world could be peaceful, that would be the best.”
But East Asia’s peace is becoming uneasy, and the programme When Titans Clash examines the growing tensions.
For example, amid the worst military tensions between China and Taiwan in 40 years, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has prompted some analysts to question whether Taiwan is next.
An emergency preparedness workshop in Taiwan.
China has been sending more and more military jets into Taiwan’s air defence identification zone since 2020 to signal dissatisfaction and keep the island’s fighter fleet stressed.
This zone stretches beyond Taiwan’s airspace, covering a broader area that Taiwan monitors for threats.
From this January to May, Taiwan reported 465 incursions by Chinese aircraft, an increase of nearly 50 per cent from the same period last year, according to Agence France-Presse’s database.
The superpower rivalry between the US and China has also cast a shadow on Taiwan Strait tensions and other East Asian issues, including North Korea’s nuclear threat as well as sour relations between Beijing and Tokyo, and Beijing and Seoul.
The rivalry between the US and China, their flags pictured here, has also started a shift towards a bipolar system, said some experts.
JAPAN’S DISTRUST OF CHINA, AND THE NUCLEAR TABOO
For Japan and South Korea, nuclear deterrence has become a bigger consideration in recent months, although any moves on that front would destabilise the region, said some experts.
Both countries come under the US’ nuclear umbrella — its promise to protect them with its nuclear weapons in the event of a nuclear attack.
Days after Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb 24, however, former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe called on his country to consider hosting US nuclear weapons, saying the topic should be discussed without “taboo”.
A similar arrangement exists within the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), whereby Germany and some other non-nuclear NATO states store US nuclear weapons in their territories and maintain their own means of weapons delivery. This is known as nuclear sharing.
But Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, whose family’s hometown is Hiroshima, is against the idea.
“It’s unacceptable from the standpoint of adhering to the three non-nuclear principles,” he said on Feb 28, referring to the principles of not possessing, producing or allowing the introduction of nuclear weapons in Japan.
Despite the government’s stance, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party discussed nuclear deterrence and nuclear sharing internally the following month, Kyodo News reported.
The Ukrainian conflict’s “take-home lesson to some Japanese politicians (is) that a nuclear deterrent may be an important way to push back against not only North Korea … but also push back against what the Japanese understand is the sort of Chinese behaviour in the East China Sea, South China Sea and across the Taiwan Strait”, said Stephen Nagy, senior associate professor in the department of politics and international studies at the International Christian University in Tokyo.
In Tokyo, a peace march for Ukraine.
China and Japan both claim a string of islands — called Diaoyu by the Chinese and Senkaku by the Japanese — in the East China Sea northeast of Taiwan. China and several countries also have rival claims in the South China Sea.
And one reason for Japan’s “very sour” relations with China over the past two decades is the “serious challenge” from China in the Senkaku/Diaoyu dispute, said Yasuhiro Matsuda of the University of Tokyo’s Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia.
The Chinese “sent their vessels into the contiguous zones of the Senkaku islands, and they’re staying there all the time”, said the professor. “They used to be non-equipped … but now they’re equipped (with) weapons.”
The Japanese government in turn has “sent a diplomatic demarche to Beijing every day”, he said.
Among the Japanese, distrust of China is “very deep”, whereas public sentiment is on the side of Taiwan. “Japanese affinity towards Taiwan is high … so I think it’s quite natural for the Japanese people to worry about (the) Taiwan contingency,” Matsuda added.
Chinese Coastguard trying to exert pressure in the waters surrounding the Senkaku islands, which are controlled by Japan. (Image source: Japan Coastguard)
For its part, China has said the Taiwan issue has “nothing to do with Japan”. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said China is “firmly opposed” to “individual politicians in Japan … arrogantly discussing China’s internal affairs”.
“Japan’s war of aggression against China, its half-century-long colonial rule over Taiwan and its untold crimes against the Chinese people are serious historical crimes,” Wang said.
“Recently, Japanese politicians have frequently made fallacious remarks relating to Taiwan and even overtly made remarks that violate their three non-nuclear principles. It fully reveals the dangerous trend of militarism in Japan.”
SOUTH KOREANS IN FAVOUR OF NUCLEAR ARMAMENT
Over in South Korea, a new leader has said he wants to bolster his country’s defence capabilities and strengthen cooperation with the US and Japan.
South Korea’s new leader, Yoon Suk-yeol. (Image source: AP)
President Yoon Suk-yeol, elected in March, has taken a tough stance against North Korea compared to his predecessor, Moon Jae-in. He has said Seoul will discuss economic cooperation and offer economic support only after Pyongyang decides to denuclearise.
Last month, the US warned that North Korea could conduct its seventh nuclear test “at any time”, something it has not done in five years. It has tested an unprecedented number of missiles this year, according to the US.
But South Korea’s defence responses have led to scuffles with China.
In 2016, South Korea decided to deploy the US’ Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (THAAD) missile system to counter the threat from North Korea. Beijing opposed this, reportedly because the system’s radar could be used to spy on China.
Beijing retaliated by scrutinising South Korean conglomerate Lotte’s stores in China, closing nearly half of them for safety violations. Lotte had swapped land with the South Korean government for the THAAD deployment.
Terminal High Altitude Area Defence missile interceptors being deployed. (Image source: US Department of Defence)
And in a wave of anti-Korean sentiment, some Chinese consumers boycotted Korean products as well as travel to the country. China continues to speak out against the THAAD deployment to this day.
If the Yoon administration buys a new THAAD battery, as he promised in the presidential race, “the Chinese are almost certainly going to return to the kind of economic punishment that they did before”, said John Delury of Yonsei University.
But China’s economic retaliation left a bad impression on South Koreans, noted the professor of Chinese studies. Making things worse are “chronic irritants” such as clashes between Chinese fishing fleets and South Korean coastguards.
There was also the traditional Korean dress, hanbok, being presented as one of China’s ethnic minority costumes at this year’s Beijing Winter Olympics.
“Each one of these incidents just slowly keeps tipping the (scales),” said Delury. “We’ve seen this in polling to indicate the general view of China, among the South Korean public, is increasingly negative.”
The hanbok was one of the costumes presented at the Beijing Winter Olympics opening ceremony. (Photo: AP)
Public opinion has also shifted towards the country developing its own nuclear weapons, according to a survey conducted by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.
Of the representative sample of 1,500 adults surveyed last December by the US-based think-tank, 71 per cent favoured South Korea developing its own nuclear weapons, while 56 percent supported a deployment of US nuclear weapons in South Korea.
Participants vastly preferred an independent arsenal (67 per cent) over US deployment (9 per cent).
“This shift in perceptions in South Korea, I think, was caused by the fact that there’s no sign of improvement in denuclearising North Korea,” said research fellow Lee Dong Gyu of the South Korean think-tank, Asan Institute for Policy Studies.
“Nuclear armament (of South Korea) can be a great military pressure on North Korea and China. But at the same time, it’s highly likely to intensify military tensions and (the) arms race in the region.”
Delury agreed, but he does not see Yoon’s administration pursuing nuclearisation “right out of the gates”, given that it would be a “highly destabilising” move for the region. “I’m not sure that really serves South Korea’s interests,” he said.
‘LET SLEEPING DOGS LIE’
One bright spot in East Asia is trade.
China, Japan and South Korea are members of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, a free trade agreement (FTA) between the member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and its five FTA partners (including Australia and New Zealand).
Despite security concerns about China, the Japanese recognise their neighbour as “the most important economic partner” in the region, noted Nagy. The Chinese government, especially at the local level, is also “very committed” to strong economic ties.
It’s Japanese businesses that hire millions of Chinese in China. They provide technological infusion, human capacity building, and local governments in China welcome that investment.”
This means both countries’ leaders are “reticent to criticise” each other because they want to maintain strong economic relations, Nagy added.
Instead, “they (show) their displeasure through an increased number of vessels in and around Japanese waters, or in the case of Taiwan … circumnavigating Taiwan with fighter planes”.
WATCH: The Taiwan (Japan & South Korea) contingency (46:34)
While observers see a shift to a bipolar world, with China and the US each building a network of countries to push back against the other, former Chinese diplomat Victor Gao said China is actually a champion of the current international order.
But Beijing dislikes it when any country tries to “dictate its will” or holds itself to be “possessing the total truth”, added Gao, vice-president of the Centre for China and Globalisation.
Former Singaporean diplomat Kishore Mahbubani, who spearheads the National University of Singapore’s Asian Peace Programme, has some advice to offer on how to maintain peace.
Even as the world undergoes major changes, East Asian countries must step up their diplomatic engagement and have “far more dialogues (and) face-to-face diplomacy”, he said.
Mr Kishore Mahbubani.
Also, the US must “let sleeping dogs lie” on the Taiwan issue “because the status quo has kept peace”.
“There are very few predictions I dare to make in geopolitics very confidently. One prediction I make very confidently is that if the government in Taiwan declares that Taiwan no longer represents the Republic of China, but instead is an independent, sovereign state, China will declare war,” he said.
“For all of us who want to prevent wars in this region, let’s advise Taiwan to keep to the status quo.”
Watch this episode of When Titans Clash here.




4. Is Using Nuclear Weapons Still Taboo?

I fear it is only a taboo for the only country that has ever used nuclear weapons.

Excerpts:
Leaders who are willing to engage in genocide might not feel many inhibitions about using a nuclear weapon.
Russian officials have portrayed Ukraine’s national identity and existence as a threat to Russia and have employed increasingly exterminationist language in their stated quest to “denazify” Ukraine as well as to justify the war to the Russian public. Coming on top of what appear to be appalling Russian war crimes in the Ukrainian cities of Bucha, Kherson, Mariupol, and elsewhere, such talk raises the specter of genocide. Leaders who are willing to engage in genocide might not feel many inhibitions about using a nuclear weapon.
We do not know what is in Putin’s head, of course. But the worry is that if the war continues going badly for Russia, Putin might reach for a tactical nuclear weapon—a low-yield bomb designed for use on the battlefield—out of frustration. While smaller than the big city-razing strategic ones, they are still tremendously destructive thermonuclear weapons with all the devastating effects of the Hiroshima bomb.
The United States and Ukraine do not have identical interests in this war. While Russia’s aggression, protected by nuclear threats, must not pay, the United States has an obligation to avoid a wider war that could increase the risk of direct U.S.-Russian confrontation. Of all the lessons of the past, the risk of nuclear war is one we forget only at our deepest peril.



Is Using Nuclear Weapons Still Taboo?
The world is starting to forget the realities of nuclear weapons.
Foreign Policy · by Nina Tannenwald · July 1, 2022
In March 1990, the New Yorker published a cartoon by Jack Ziegler that captured the optimism at the end of the Cold War. The cartoon shows an executive sitting at his desk as a worker enters the office carrying a large bomb with fins. “Bring that H-bomb over here, will you, Tom, and just slip it into my ‘out’ box,” the executive says. “Sure thing, boss!” the worker responds.
The image of putting nuclear bombs “in the outbox” was emblematic of the hope many had that a new era of cooperation between the United States and the former Soviet Union was emerging. The fear of a nuclear war breaking out between the world’s two superpowers receded, and many hoped that nuclear weapons, although they would still exist, would no longer be central to international politics. Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet Union’s last leader, declared in June 1991 that “the risk of a global nuclear war has practically disappeared.”

This article appears in the Summer 2022 print issue. Subscribe now for unlimited access to FP, plus the print magazine.
Today, more than 30 years later, nuclear bombs are back in the inbox. Fear of nuclear war between the United States and Russia has returned with a vengeance. As a result of Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine and Russian officials’ alarming nuclear threats, the world is closer to the use of nuclear weapons out of desperation—or by accident or miscalculation—than at any time since the early 1980s.
The Russia-Ukraine war serves as a harsh reminder of some old truths about nuclear weapons: There are limits to the protection nuclear deterrence provides. (Usable conventional weapons may get you more protection.) In a crisis, deterrence is vulnerable, not automatic and self-enforcing. There is always the chance that it could fail.
In the first decades after World War II, many U.S. military and political leaders, and much of the public, expected or feared that nuclear weapons would be used again. Hiroshima and Nagasaki made the horrors of atomic bombings visible for all. The notion that nuclear war could happen at any moment permeated American society. Many Cold War-era buildings—including schools, airports, and even motels—were constructed with a fallout shelter in the basement. The instruction to “duck and cover” in the event of a nuclear attack (rather than run to a window to look out) became part of U.S. civil defense drills that every U.S. citizen, including schoolchildren, was encouraged to practice.
Movies such as On the Beach (1959), a piece of post-apocalyptic science fiction, depicted a world annihilated by nuclear war. Military strategists such as Herman Kahn, one of the historical inspirations for the madman title character of Stanley Kubrick’s classic black comedy Dr. Strangelove, proselytized about “thinking the unthinkable”—the need to think about how we would fight and survive a nuclear war. Events such as the Cuban missile crisis made these fears palpably real. For 13 days in October 1962, the world came the closest it ever has to nuclear war. Many people at the time believed the world was about to end in mushroom clouds.
Yet, during the same period, norms of restraint developed. A nuclear taboo—a normative inhibition against the first use of nuclear weapons—emerged as the result of both strategic interests and moral concerns. A global grassroots anti-nuclear movement, along with nonnuclear states and the United Nations, actively sought to stigmatize nuclear weapons as unacceptable weapons of mass destruction. After the scare of the Cuban missile crisis, the United States and the Soviet Union also pursued arms control agreements to help stabilize the “balance of terror.” These norms of nuclear restraint helped foster the now nearly 77-year tradition of nonuse of nuclear weapons, the single-most important feature of the nuclear age.
But today, most of these arms control agreements have been torn up, and nuclear-armed states are once again engaged in costly arms races. We are in a period of nuclear excess rather than restraint. All of this brings us to the current moment and the big question suddenly on everyone’s minds: Do Russian leaders share the nuclear taboo? Would Russian President Vladimir Putin use a nuclear weapon in the war in Ukraine?
He certainly wants the world—and in particular the United States—to at least think he might. On the day he announced the beginning of a “special military operation” in Ukraine, Putin warned that any country that attempted to interfere in the war would face “such consequences that you have never experienced in your history,” which many took to be a veiled nuclear threat. Other Russian officials have made similar statements over the course of the war.
So far, it is likely that these threats are more about deterring NATO than actual use. Russia has apparently not increased the alert levels of its nuclear forces but rather activated a communications system that could transmit a launch order. Russian officials are certainly aware that any use of nuclear weapons would bring devastating consequences for Russia and for Putin himself, including widespread condemnation and global opprobrium. As Anatoly Antonov, Russia’s ambassador to the United States, claimed in early May, “It is our country that in recent years has persistently proposed to American colleagues to affirm that there can be no winners in a nuclear war, thus it should never happen.” Still, the risk that Putin would use a nuclear weapon is not zero, and the longer the war goes on the more the risk goes up.
The United States and NATO have reciprocated neither the discourse of Russian officials (nuclear threats) nor the claimed behavior (enhanced readiness of nuclear arsenals) but rather have funneled vast amounts of conventional weapons to Ukraine while promising to pursue accountability for Russian war crimes. Despite scattered calls in the United States for the creation of a “no-fly zone” over some or all of Ukraine, the Biden administration wisely resisted. In practice, this would mean shooting down Russian planes and risk igniting World War III.
Yet, as the war drags on, the United States may be sleepwalking into an expanded—and therefore more dangerous—war. Russia’s weak military performance has tempted defense hawks and unrequited Cold Warriors to shift the goals from simply helping to prevent Ukraine’s defeat to, as U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin suggested on April 25, creating a “weakened” Russia. An alarming number of foreign-policy commentators, including retired U.S. military officers and NATO supporters who should know better, have cavalierly urged the Biden administration to get much more aggressive in helping Ukraine or even pursue total victory, despite the risk of nuclear escalation.
Using the Russia-Ukraine war to reassert U.S. hegemony is a dangerous game. There is a whiff of nuclear forgetting in the air.
Using the war to reassert U.S. hegemony is a dangerous game. There is a whiff of nuclear forgetting in the air. One reason the Cold War remained cold was that U.S. leaders recognized that confronting a nuclear-armed adversary imposes constraints on action. When the Soviet Union invaded Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, the United States refrained from responding with military force. Yet today there is an entire generation (or more) of people for whom the scary realities of the Cold War and “duck and cover” are the stuff of history books, rather than lived experience. As the historian Daniel Immerwahr wrote recently, “This is the first decade when not a single head of a nuclear state can remember Hiroshima.”
In making nuclear dangers vivid again, the Russia-Ukraine war reminds us of not just the benefits but also the significant risks and limits of nuclear deterrence. Deterrence has likely kept Russia from expanding the war to NATO countries such as Poland and Romania. Russia’s nuclear arsenal has kept NATO from intervening directly, but it has also failed to help Russia take or hold significant territory in Ukraine or compel Kyiv to surrender. Most importantly, the war reminds us that controlling escalation is a giant unknown. We have no idea what would happen if a nuclear weapon were actually used.
The war also reminds us that norms are ultimately breakable. In the last few years, numerous norms that we once thought were robust have been undermined. Norms of democracy are under siege in the United States and elsewhere. Internationally, states have eroded norms of territorial integrity, multilateralism, arms control, and humanitarian law. The nuclear taboo, while widely shared, is more fragile than other kinds of norms because a small number of violations would likely destroy it.
Read More
Mushroom cloud from operation UPSHOT-KNOTHOLE Nevada in 1953
A new nuclear era demands strategy, not just arms control.
A Russian nuclear missile rolls along Red Square during a military parade
The urge to do more to help Ukraine is running up against concerns over nuclear escalation with Russia.
Some might argue that the taboo and deterrence are robust because no rational leader would see a benefit to starting a nuclear war. The prominent international relations realist Kenneth Waltz, a proponent of nuclear deterrence, famously wrote that nuclear weapons create “strong incentives to use them responsibly.” The problem is that, even if true some of the time, this may not always be true. Not all leaders may be rational or responsible. This view also overlooks the possibility that nuclear war could begin through accident, misperception, or miscalculation. In short, the nuclear taboo and deterrence are always at risk.
Which brings us back to Putin. In 1999, Putin launched himself to power as Russia’s prime minister, overseeing the country’s shockingly brutal second war in Chechnya. Since then, Russia under Putin has shown itself willing to violate important international norms, including those against territorial conquest (Crimea, Ukraine) and against attacking civilian targets. Shredding the rules of war, the Russian military has inflicted devastation and cruelty on civilians in Chechnya, Syria, and now Ukraine. In Ukraine, Russia shelled Europe’s largest nuclear power plant at Zaporizhzhia, a reckless act that set part of the facility on fire. Such strikes risk nuclear disaster.
Leaders who are willing to engage in genocide might not feel many inhibitions about using a nuclear weapon.
Russian officials have portrayed Ukraine’s national identity and existence as a threat to Russia and have employed increasingly exterminationist language in their stated quest to “denazify” Ukraine as well as to justify the war to the Russian public. Coming on top of what appear to be appalling Russian war crimes in the Ukrainian cities of Bucha, Kherson, Mariupol, and elsewhere, such talk raises the specter of genocide. Leaders who are willing to engage in genocide might not feel many inhibitions about using a nuclear weapon.
We do not know what is in Putin’s head, of course. But the worry is that if the war continues going badly for Russia, Putin might reach for a tactical nuclear weapon—a low-yield bomb designed for use on the battlefield—out of frustration. While smaller than the big city-razing strategic ones, they are still tremendously destructive thermonuclear weapons with all the devastating effects of the Hiroshima bomb.
The United States and Ukraine do not have identical interests in this war. While Russia’s aggression, protected by nuclear threats, must not pay, the United States has an obligation to avoid a wider war that could increase the risk of direct U.S.-Russian confrontation. Of all the lessons of the past, the risk of nuclear war is one we forget only at our deepest peril.
Foreign Policy · by Nina Tannenwald · July 1, 2022


5. The Best Evidence of a Future Ukrainian Victory is the Country’s Valiant Past: Part One


The Best Evidence of a Future Ukrainian Victory is the Country’s Valiant Past: Part One - KyivPost - Ukraine's Global Voice
By Walter Zaryckyj. Published July 2 at 2:15 pm
During the early hours of the Russo-Ukrainian War, when it became clear that Vladimir Putin was mounting a full scale invasion, rather than just a much anticipated minor incursion, most, though not all, of the leading players in Euro-Atlantic political, military, academic and media circles took to the airwaves to make some rather dire forecasts and to dispense equally dire advice to the Ukrainians.
It was predicted that border cities in the north and east, as well as coastal cities in the south, might fall within a day or two and that the capital Kyiv would be forced to surrender within a week. President Zelensky was advised to move the seat of government to Ukraine’s westernmost large city, Lviv, or, better yet, to set up shop in exile. The Ukrainian armed forces, in turn, were told to head for the Carpathian Mountains and convert to insurgency-style warfare.
As the hours turned into days, it became apparent that the dire predictions of swift failure might be off base and that the grim advice given to the Ukrainian government to evacuate was premature. The northern and eastern cities like Kharkiv, Sumy, Chernihiv and Zhytomyr had held strong. And among the port towns on the Black or Azov seas like Odesa, Mykolayiv, Kherson and Mariupil, only Kherson was occupied, and its occupation was proving to be no certain fact, given that thousands of Ukrainians in the coastal city were staging protests against the Russian invaders.
Meanwhile the dreaded quick drive into Kyiv seemed stalled after preparatory air assaults on the airports of the capital had not worked out as planned. With this in mind, President Zelensky not only decided to stay in Kyiv but opted to use his office on Bankova in the center to give daily briefings to the Ukrainian nation as a gesture of defiance. As the days turned into weeks, the dire predictions were proving to be shockingly wrong, and the advice to abandon Kyiv truly ill conceived.
In the south, a fierce battle in Mykolayiv had not only held up any advance to Odesa but had thrown the Russian forces back upon Kherson. In the east, the attack on Kharkiv had gone badly enough to warrant a decision by Russian forces to bypass it. And in the north, the Russians had begun a “grand re-positioning” in city after city, including Kyiv itself, in what looked like a not so grand withdrawal.
Meanwhile, Zelensky was proving audacious enough to turn his briefings to the nation into walking tours of Kyiv. He also took to using zoom webinars with various friendly governments to drum up support and assistance for Ukraine’s defense needs and to assure them that his government was firmly in control of matters in Kyiv.
Disbelief, embarrassment as Ukraine defies Western predictions of defeat
The unfolding of the aforementioned cascade of events initially elicited disbelief in the West: Can we verify the reports? This was followed by a period of skepticism: Maybe the Russians have not fully committed yet? Finally, there was a full throated admission of astonishment – when Russian forces actually began leaving the northern cities.
And once astonishment and amazement entered the picture, an inevitable moment of self-reflection occurred. The Western media turned back to its pundits and to the myriad of “experts” from political, military and academic circles in the Euro-Atlantic
community – indeed, in the global democratic community in general. The question asked of them was a thoroughly blunt one: How could all of you have gotten things so wrong?
The question launched a veritable tsunami of mea culpas. Media outlet after media outlet witnessed a gnashing of teeth followed by a lot of swallowing of pride. A whole series of graphics showing “the glorious Russian army” advancing along the entire northern front were suddenly pulled off countless screens accompanied by apologies from various analysts who had been ceding Ukrainian territory to the enemy. The only voices that were exempted from the self-flagellation were those few doubting Thomases, essentially American generals with actual experience in commanding US or NATO troops in Europe during the last three decades, who from the beginning had raised the question: Does Putin really think that he can take all of Ukraine with 200,000 troops when it would take 300 thousand just to capture and hold Kyiv?
As it turned out, once the self-flagellation subsided, or the Western media got tired of simply beating up on its own, the very same commanders were allowed to ask a follow up set of questions: Were the Russians really this bad? And was it possible that the Russian army was only suited for parades on Red Square to celebrate World War II Victory Days? The new questions coincided with news that Russia’s repositioning gambit was turning into an open, headlong retreat from all points north in Ukraine, leaving a set of atrocities on full display to be judged in the future as war crimes. At that moment, the narrative that Russia had proved to be weaker than
expected leapt into the lead by a wide margin.
Competing narratives
While the weak Russia storyline firmly took hold of the air waves, another narrative quietly and tenuously appeared alongside. The parallel narrative took to shifting the center of attention from Russia’s foibles in the war to the astounding resourcefulness and resilience that the Ukrainians were exhibiting – an intriguing minor miracle, given that Ukraine until that point had been treated as an object rather
than as a subject capable of having an impact of its own on matters.
Equally intriguing and important, the most impressive version of the new storyline was one that placed the do-or-die tenacity of the Ukrainian armed forces – in contrast to the undisciplined childlike behavior of the Russian military – in a firmly historical context. The cited seminal experience was the Mongol invasions of 1239-1241. Unlike the Eastern Slavic city-states of the north, including the newly
minted Moscovy, all of whom submitted to the yoke of the Khans for the next two hundred years, Kyivans fought to the bitter end and endured a Carthage-like destruction of their beloved city state nestled on the shores of the northern Dnipro only to emerge an identical two centuries later in the southern Dnipro river basin as the Zaporizhian Cossacks (from the Turkic word for freemen)
Though clearly an insightful construct, the tenacious-and-resilient-Ukrainian narrative was unable to gain altitude, because in a matter of days the Russians indicated that they were no longer interested in the Ukrainian cities in the north or east, or for that matter, by omission, the southern cities beyond Kherson, either. Their objective, they now said, had always been and remained the Donbas: i.e., attaching the Ukrainian-held territories in the region to the unrecognized Moscow puppet states of DNR and LNR.
There was no admission by Russia of any errors or flaws in their mission. Rather, the Kremlin in a matter of fact tone explained that, in the first phase of the war, the task was to exhaust the Ukrainian forces thoroughly throughout Ukraine. In phase two, we were told, Russian forces would break through the Ukrainian defenses in Izyum in northern Donbas, do the same in Mariupil in southern Donbas, proceed to encircle the Ukrainian forces in central Donbas, fight a classic tank-on tank-battle in a category they excel in, and ultimately seize control of the entire area in the aftermath. Or, as the Western media quaintly summarized the emerging headline of the war: “The Russians are finally getting down to business!”
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6. CRS Report: Ukrainian Military Performance and Outlook


Date: June 29, 2022
 
Ukrainian Military Performance and Outlook
The Ukrainian Armed Forces (UAF) continue to face disadvantages in seeking to defend Ukraine's territorial integrity against Russian military forces. On the one hand, since Russia's renewed invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the UAF has successfully defended against, and in some areas pushed back, Russian forces. On the other hand, this resistance has come with losses in personnel and equipment, and the overall outlook for the war remains uncertain. The Biden Administration and Congress have expressed support for Ukraine's defense of its territorial integrity against Russia's invasion. An understanding of the evolving state of the UAF may be of interest to Congress as it continues to weigh policies potentially supporting Ukraine's defense against Russian aggression.
 
Personnel
Some observers note that the UAF's initially positive overall performance is due in part to the experience and motivation of its personnel. The UAF has continued to benefit from high levels of recruitment and motivation. High losses, however, pose an ongoing challenge to the UAF's ability to maintain effective and sustained operations.
 
Since 2014, the UAF has gained important combat experience fighting Russian-led forces in the Eastern Ukraine regions of the Donbas, which has led to a large proportion of trained, experienced veterans among Ukraine's population. These veterans and other volunteers (including foreign recruits, some with previous military experience) were quickly mobilized into Ukraine's new, volunteer Territorial Defense Forces (TDF) and Reserve, without the need for lengthy training. Additionally, the high level of experience and training among the recruits meant they were able to operate artillery, tank, and support systems that traditionally require time for reservists or volunteers to master. These units were crucial in supporting and enabling regular UAF units to spearhead resistance and counteroffensives in multiple areas.
 
Since the beginning of the 2022 war, Ukraine reportedly has suffered high levels of casualties. In early June 2022, Ukrainian officials estimated losses of up to 100-200 killed in action each day, but officials have not provided precise figures. Losses are likely higher among regular UAF and Special Forces units, forcing a greater reliance on TDF and Reserve units. Due to losses and the need to rotate out troops, Ukraine has had to recruit and train a substantial amount of replacements. Unlike the initial period of war when most recruits were veterans, most new recruits and volunteers have little military experience. As a result, it takes longer for the UAF to train new recruits.
 
The UAF also faces two major hurdles to training and deploying new personnel. First, like many militaries, Ukraine was in the process of developing a professional
noncommissioned officer (NCO) corps along NATO standards before Russia's 2022 invasion. The UAF did not have a fully developed professional NCO corps by the time of the invasion and continued to deal with issues with retention, professional development, and funding. As described previously, the high proportion of trained veterans, many with combat experience, mitigated to some degree the need for an established NCO corps to train and command new recruits. However, with mounting UAF losses and recruits with no experience as replacements, continuing the development of an effective NCO corps will likely remain a major challenge and a key UAF priority.
 
Second, the UAF's need for immediate reinforcements creates pressure to train new recruits to only the bare minimum levels. Training recruits to conduct complex operations and operate advanced weapon systems takes longer, but both areas are widely considered necessary for the UAF to sustain combat operations in the current conflict.
 
Equipment
To date, the UAF also has sustained equipment losses. Some UAF units appear to be operating without mechanized or motorized vehicles support, likely due to losses and maintenance issues. On June 15, Ukrainian Brigadier General Volodymyr Karpenko estimated that some UAF units sustained losses of up to 50% of their equipment. Although this could be an overestimation, it also likely reflects the UAF's need for further support across tanks, armored personnel carriers, and artillery systems.
 
Ukrainian officials have emphasized their need for long- range rocket and artillery systems to counter Russia's quantitative and qualitative advantage in long-range fire. At the start of the war, Ukraine still relied on Soviet and Russian 122mm and 152mm caliber rocket and artillery systems. Ukraine also had a smaller number of longer-range 220mm and 300mm rocket systems, but it is unclear how many are still in service.
 
The UAF relies primarily on Soviet-era and Russian equipment. Russia has targeted Ukraine's large defense industry with long-range missile strikes, affecting Ukraine's ability to maintain, repair, and produce equipment and ammunition to sustain operations. Ukraine's capacity to repair and maintain equipment is likely degraded due to Russian targeting, posing a hurdle to the UAF's ability to sustain operations. Additionally, the Ukrainian defense industry is likely unable to produce complex systems in sufficient quantities for its current combat needs. Some Central and East European states maintain defense industries that are compatible with Soviet and early Russian equipment, specifically in their production of small and artillery ammunition. Some observers estimate, however, that their production capacity is likely insufficient for Ukraine's needs. Due to the artillery-intensive nature of the conflict, the UAF requires ammunition supplies to sustain operations.
 
Ukraine's air force and air defenses have proven effective thus far at limiting Russian air superiority. Russia retains air superiority in certain regions, however, and continues to target Ukrainian air defenses. It is unclear how many of Ukraine's medium- and long-range air defense systems remain operational, and Russian targeting appears to limit their forward deployment, forcing frontline UAF units to rely on short-range man portable air defense (MANPAD) systems.
 
Role of U.S. and Western Security Assistance
Since the start of Russia's 2022 war, the United States has provided Ukraine more than $6.1 billion in security assistance. The United States and European allies and partners continue to contribute training, logistics, intelligence, and military assistance. Observers note the tension between providing equipment and training for immediate use on the battlefield and the training required to effectively employ these systems over the longer term. Another concern is the impact of such assistance on U.S. and Western stockpiles and the time it will take for domestic defense industries to replenish.
 
Training
Prior to Russia's 2022 invasion, the United States and other allies contributed training and advice to the UAF. Current efforts focus on training the UAF to operate and employ Western security assistance, specifically on advanced systems. Due to the lengthy time required to effectively train and maintain many Western systems, U.S. and European allies are focusing on the minimum training necessary to operate in the field. This approach may facilitate the rapid employment of these weapons on the battlefield. However, without expertise to maintain and repair damaged equipment, the long-term effectiveness of these weapons may be undermined. Observers also note the UAF's need for assistance and training in planning, operations, and logistics.
 
Equipment
In the initial phase of the war, U.S. and European provision of anti-tank and MANPAD systems appeared crucial in supporting UAF defense against Russian forces. As the war has evolved, however, so have the needs and requests of the UAF. Ukrainian officials note that Russia has had an advantage in artillery, specifically long-range, fire. In response, U.S. and other Western governments are sending Ukraine advanced artillery, mobile artillery, and rocket systems. Once deployed, and if properly utilized, these systems will likely increase UAF capabilities. Observers note that the UAF's ability to repair and maintain these systems will prove decisive. Ukrainian officials also note a need for compatible types of ammunition, especially as the UAF transitions to Western systems.
 
Current Military Performance and Outlook
Over four months into the war, the UAF appears to be focused on an attrition strategy of grinding down Russian forces and holding territorial lines, specifically in the Donbas. The UAF has demonstrated a willingness to conduct local counterattacks across the country. Ukrainian Special Forces and local partisan forces reportedly have conducted some raids into Russian-controlled territory.
 
In addition, the UAF command structure appears to have become more centralized, as opposed to the more localized command structure exhibited earlier in the war. The UAF leadership appears to be consolidating reserves to contest Russian advances in the Donbas. Some observers believe the UAF decision to focus on an attrition strategy is designed to exhaust Russian forces. However, with the Donbas a priority for reinforcements, it is unclear if the UAF can sustain counterattacks in other regions. Additionally, the UAF risks exhaustion due to casualties and requires a coherent strategy of rotating forces in and out of combat.
 
Russia's armed forces retain advantages in force size, equipment (specifically artillery and long-range fire), air support, and electronic warfare. Some observers believe Russia's advantages will probably decrease in time, since Russia's ability to recruit and train new professional soldiers in sufficient quantities without a national mobilization remains questionable. In contrast, Ukraine is likely to continue to recruit large numbers of personnel. As mentioned, training these new recruits to a sufficient standard is expected to last as a core challenge.
 
These developments remain important factors for Congress to consider when discussing options to support Ukraine's defense. Some observers believe UAF capabilities will increase with continued U.S. and Western security assistance, specifically artillery and long-range missile systems. Continued and sufficient UAF training in the operation and maintenance of these systems will also likely determine the extent of the improvement in UAF capabilities. The UAF has identified additional needs in logistics, medical evacuation and care, and intelligence. Communications problems endure, with Russian electronic warfare and a lack of reliable systems hindering the UAF's ability to coordinate operations. It is also unclear if the UAF will gain the ability to upscale its operations and conduct large-scale offensives to retake territory.
 
For more information, see the following:
CRS Report R47068, Russia's War in Ukraine: Military and Intelligence Aspects, by Andrew S. Bowen
CRS In Focus IF11862, Ukrainian Armed Forces, by Andrew S. Bowen
CRS In Focus IF12040, U.S. Security Assistance to Ukraine, by Christina L. Arabia, Andrew S. Bowen, and Cory Welt.



7.



8. An American’s Murky Path From Russian Propagandist to Jan. 6

Another truth may be stranger than fiction story:
People who have written for Mr. Bausman’s websites or promoted his work have come under scrutiny by American intelligence, and the founder of a pro-Russia forum that hosted him and others was charged in March with being an unregistered agent of Moscow.
Mr. Bausman initially gained some prominence as a Russia apologist, but he has lowered his profile in recent years as he has espoused more extreme views. Yet he has been Zelig-like in exploiting cultural and political flash points, racing from cause to cause.
After surfacing as a voluble defender of Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea, Mr. Bausman became an outspoken Trump supporter. With white nationalism on the rise, he threw himself into promoting it, relocating to rural Pennsylvania and hosting neo-Nazis at his property. He joined Republican protests against coronavirus restrictions and the 2020 election and most recently has reappeared in Russian media to criticize the West’s response to the war in Ukraine.



An American’s Murky Path From Russian Propagandist to Jan. 6
The New York Times · by Mike McIntire · July 3, 2022
Charles Bausman, a former financial executive who runs websites that promote far-right views, recorded footage in the Capitol for a Russian television producer. Soon after, he fled to Moscow as a “political refugee.”
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Charles Bausman, right, in a red cap and a gray jacket, during the Jan. 6 insurrection.Credit...via YouTube

By
July 3, 2022Updated 10:02 p.m. ET
In security footage from Jan. 6, it is easy to overlook the thin man wearing a red Trump hat who filters into the U.S. Capitol Building to record the mayhem with his phone.
He blends in with the mob, seemingly unexceptional by the chaotic standards of that day. But what he did afterward was far from routine.
Within 24 hours, the man, Charles Bausman, gave his recordings and commentary to a Russian television producer for a propaganda video. He then decamped to Moscow, where, appearing on a far-right television network owned by a sanctioned oligarch, he recently accused American media of covering up for neo-Nazis in Ukraine.
“We must understand that in the West,” Mr. Bausman told Russian viewers, “we are already in a situation of total lies.”
For Mr. Bausman — an American alumnus of Phillips Exeter Academy and Wesleyan University who speaks fluent Russian — it was the latest chapter in a strange odyssey. Once a financial executive who voted for President Barack Obama, he emerged in 2014 as a public critic of the left and of the United States, boosted by Russian state-sponsored organizations through speaking invitations, TV appearances and awards.
Central to his transformation was a series of websites he created pushing anti-America, pro-Russia themes, as well as racist and homophobic messaging. Some of his posts have racked up millions of views, and his 5,000-word screed on “the Jewish problem” has been hailed by antisemites around the world and translated into multiple languages.
Mr. Bausman’s path in some ways tracks a broader shift on the political right that embraces misinformation and sympathy toward Russia while tolerating an increasingly emboldened white nationalism. For its part, the Kremlin has sought to court conservatives in the United States and sow discord through a network of expats, collaborators and spies.
People who have written for Mr. Bausman’s websites or promoted his work have come under scrutiny by American intelligence, and the founder of a pro-Russia forum that hosted him and others was charged in March with being an unregistered agent of Moscow.
Mr. Bausman initially gained some prominence as a Russia apologist, but he has lowered his profile in recent years as he has espoused more extreme views. Yet he has been Zelig-like in exploiting cultural and political flash points, racing from cause to cause.
After surfacing as a voluble defender of Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea, Mr. Bausman became an outspoken Trump supporter. With white nationalism on the rise, he threw himself into promoting it, relocating to rural Pennsylvania and hosting neo-Nazis at his property. He joined Republican protests against coronavirus restrictions and the 2020 election and most recently has reappeared in Russian media to criticize the West’s response to the war in Ukraine.
Mr. Bausman attended a 2015 conference hosted by RT, a news channel tied to the Kremlin.Credit...Mikhail Voskresenskiy/Sputnik, via AP
Konstantin Malofeev, an influential oligarch indicted by the United States over alleged sanctions violations, said he had asked Mr. Bausman to appear on his television network because Mr. Bausman was one of the few Russian-speaking Americans willing to do it.
“Who else is there to invite?” Mr. Malofeev asked.
Mr. Bausman, 58, did not respond to multiple requests for comment. No charges have been brought against him related to the events of Jan. 6, though he appears inside the Capitol in video clips introduced in court cases against others. When a Russian TV host referred to him as “a participant” in storming the Capitol, Mr. Bausman interrupted to say that the description could get him into trouble, and that he was a journalist.
Better Understand the Russia-Ukraine War
But, on other occasions, he has described himself differently. Speaking on a white nationalist podcast in April, in which he attacked critics of Russia as “evil pedophile globalists” who control the “enslaved West,” he explained why he was back in Moscow:
“I’m a political refugee here.”
Connecticut to Moscow
President Vladimir V. Putin had just invaded Crimea in 2014 when Mr. Bausman said he had an idea. He would create an alternative news source to counter what he called Western media’s “inaccurate, incomplete and unrealistically negative picture of Russia.”
The website, Russia Insider, was directed at an English-speaking audience and offered stories like, “Putin to Obama: You’re Turning the U.S.A. Into a Godless Sewer,” and “Anti-Christian Pogrom Underway in Ukraine.” Content was often aggregated from other pro-Russia sources, including RT, the Kremlin-funded television network.
The role of online agitator was not an obvious one for Mr. Bausman, who grew up in the wealthy suburb of Greenwich, Conn., attended prep school and went on to earn a history degree from Wesleyan and study business at Columbia. His experience with Russia dates to his childhood, when his father served as the Moscow bureau chief for The Associated Press.
Mr. Bausman with his father, who worked in Moscow for The Associated Press.
As a college graduate in the late 1980s, he returned to Russia, and, with help from his father’s connections, worked briefly for NBC News. But when the Soviet Union collapsed, Mr. Bausman found a new role: as a multilingual fixer for entrepreneurs scrambling to cash in on the emerging economy.
A. Craig Copetas, a former Wall Street Journal correspondent who wrote a book about the post-Soviet business era, said Mr. Bausman worked with Russians who “were the forerunners of the oligarchs.”
“Charlie speaks excellent Russian,” he said, “so he was a valuable asset — he was like the young American prince of Moscow.”
Mr. Bausman’s early success was not to last. There are gaps in his résumé, and U.S. court records show that he filed for bankruptcy in 1999.
A former business associate recalled Mr. Bausman’s father beseeching people to “help my son” with his career. This person — one of several who did not want to be identified because of Mr. Bausman’s ties to extremists — described him as “just this lost guy” who seemed to struggle professionally despite impressive qualifications. He worked a succession of Russian private equity jobs, never staying in any position longer than a few years.
Mr. Bausman’s last role was with the agribusiness investor AVG Capital Partners. A 2012 company presentation, which listed him as director of investor relations, boasted of “strong partnerships” with Russian authorities and included a photo of Mr. Putin.
The exact timing of Mr. Bausman’s switch to propagandist is murky, but two profiles on the Russian social media platform VK offer a clue. The first, from 2011, is a sparse page featuring a wan Mr. Bausman in a suit and a link to a group interested in tennis.
In the second profile, from two years later, he looks tan and confident in an open-collared shirt. The VK groups he joined were strikingly radical, including a militant Russian Orthodox sect and another called the Internet Militia, whose goal echoed what would soon become Mr. Bausman’s focus: “to protect and defend our native information field” against American attack.
Oligarch Connections
Publicly, Mr. Bausman turned to crowd funding to pay for Russia Insider. Behind the scenes, however, he was in contact with Mr. Malofeev, a promoter of Orthodox nationalist propaganda.
Leaked emails made public in 2014 revealed Mr. Bausman corresponding with a Malofeev associate, saying “we published your Serbia info” and asking for money. In an email to Mr. Malofeev, the associate praised Mr. Bausman’s site as “pro-Russian” and noted that he “wants to cooperate.”
Mr. Malofeev was backing another media project at the time with a similar agenda: Tsargrad TV, which he created with a former Fox News employee, John Hanick. Both Mr. Hanick and Mr. Malofeev were charged by the United States this year with violating sanctions imposed in 2014.
Mr. Bausman has appeared on the television network of Konstantin Malofeev, a Russian oligarch indicted by the U.S. for alleged sanctions violations.Credit...Tatyana Makeyeva/Reuters
In an interview, Mr. Malofeev said he believed Mr. Bausman “has done a great job and that he is a very brave person,” but he denied they had “a financial relationship.”
Mr. Bausman has always said he did not receive support from Russian authorities. But there is little doubt that his emergence as an American salesman of pro-Kremlin views was aided greatly by entities controlled by or tied to the Russian state.
After Russia Insider went live, Mr. Bausman began appearing on RT and other Russian media, and a news crew from a major state-owned TV channel traveled to his parents’ home in Connecticut to film him discussing his new website. On Facebook, he boasted that “our traffic exploded after this aired.”
He was invited to join panel discussions at another state-owned outlet, received an award in 2016 named after a pro-Russia journalist killed in Ukraine, and spoke at a Kremlin-sponsored youth conference in newly captured Crimea. He gave interviews to Russian Orthodox figures, speaking approvingly of Mr. Malofeev.
In April 2016, Mr. Bausman’s work was promoted by a Russian website, RIA FAN, that has been linked to Yevgeny Prigozhin, an oligarch indicted by the special counsel Robert S. Mueller. The website initially shared an address with the Internet Research Agency, the Russian government “troll factory” accused of using fake social media accounts and online propaganda to disrupt the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Russia analysts who have followed Mr. Bausman’s work say it has the hallmarks of a disinformation project. Olga Lautman, a senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis who researches Russian propaganda campaigns, said his messaging merged seamlessly with that of Mr. Putin’s government.
“The initial purpose of his outlet was to muddle the truth in American circles about Crimea,” she said. “And then you see his outlet and others repurposed to support the Kremlin narrative about Syria, and then the 2016 U.S. elections.
“It appears,” she said, “to be a classic Russian influence operation.”
Hard-Right Turn
With Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential victory, Mr. Bausman’s media outlet began to promote more extreme views. In a celebratory post after the election, he struck a militant chord that shocked old friends.
“Trump’s election is perhaps akin to Luther nailing his theses to the door, but now the demons are wakened, and they know they must fight or be killed, and as in the 16th century, they will not go quietly,” he wrote. “And there will be blood. Let us hope that it is the figurative, digital kind, and not the real, red, hot, sticky stuff.”
A turning point came in January 2018, when Mr. Bausman posted a lengthy polemic, “It’s Time to Drop the Jew Taboo,” that was both an antisemitic manifesto and a call to action for the alt-right.
“The evidence suggests that much of human enterprise dominated and shaped by Jews is a bottomless pit of trouble with a peculiar penchant for mendacity and cynicism, hostility to Christianity and Christian values, and in geopolitics, a clear bloodlust,” he wrote.
It was welcomed by white nationalist figures like Richard Spencer, who called it “a major event.”
Outside the far right, Mr. Bausman’s embrace of antisemitism was widely condemned. The U.S. State Department flagged it in a report on human-rights concerns in Russia, and the diatribe prompted a disavowal from RT.
After the death in August 2018 of his mother, who left an estate valued at about $2.6 million, Mr. Bausman bought two properties in Lancaster, Pa., where his family had roots.
His older sister, Mary-Fred Bausman-Watkins, said last year that her brother “was always short on money” and that their parents frequently helped him out, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has compiled several reports on his activities. Ms. Bausman-Watkins died in May.
“They funded his whole life,” she told the center, “and then he inherited their money when they died, and they’re still funding his life.”
The Insurrection
While living in Lancaster with his Russian wife and two young daughters, Mr. Bausman turned his attention to two new websites devoted largely to white nationalist content. Headlines included: “Out of Control Black Violence” and “Jewish Intellectuals Call on Gays to Perform Sex Acts in Front of Children.”
Mr. Bausman concealed his ownership of one of these sites, National Justice, through a private registration, which The New York Times confirmed by reviewing data leaked last year from Epik, a web-hosting service favored by the far right. The site has the same name as a white nationalist organization and featured posts by one of its leaders, though it is not the group’s official site, according to its chairman, Michael Peinovich.
In an interview, Mr. Peinovich said Mr. Bausman had hosted party members at his farmstead for an inaugural meeting in 2020 (a large event first reported by a local news outlet, LancasterOnline). But afterward, he said, his group “went our own way” because it did not agree with Mr. Bausman’s preoccupation with supporting Mr. Trump.
Three days before Jan. 6, 2021, Mr. Bausman allowed Rod of Iron Ministries, a gun-themed religious sect led by a son of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, to meet at his property, according to photos on social media. Members of the sect had been active in “Stop the Steal” rallies, some of which Mr. Bausman had also attended, and were at the Capitol on Jan. 6.
On Facebook, Mr. Bausman posted an appeal for people to go to Washington “to support Trump.” At various points during the riot, Mr. Bausman can be seen inside the Capitol, often using his phone to record the chaos.
Mr. Bausman, right, has said he entered the Capitol in the capacity of a journalist.Credit...via YouTube
Afterward, he returned to Lancaster and gave a lengthy interview for a video about the insurrection produced by Arkady Mamontov, a Russian television host known for splashy pro-Kremlin propaganda pieces. The video also included footage of Mr. Bausman outside his home that appears to have been filmed months earlier. Mr. Mamontov did not respond to a request for comment.
In the video, Mr. Bausman suggested, without evidence, that federal agents had instigated the violence at the Capitol to “discredit Trump,” and he painted a dystopian, conspiratorial picture of American society. It is a theme that he has carried forward to more recent appearances on Mr. Malofeev’s television network, in which he has accused Western media of lying about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
It is not clear when Mr. Bausman left the U.S., but he was in Moscow for a TV appearance on the day of President Biden’s inauguration, two weeks after the insurrection at the Capitol. In the white nationalist podcast interview he gave in April from Russia, he said he had not been back home since.
When asked by the host if he was still a Trump fan, Mr. Bausman said he was not, before adding with a laugh that there was one thing that could restore his loyalty.
“When he pardons me for Jan. 6,” he said.
Anton Troianovski contributed reporting.
The New York Times · by Mike McIntire · July 3, 2022



9. Does Putin’s War Mark a New Period in History?


Excerpts:
In the shock and horror that accompany events like the invasion of Ukraine, it is easy to forget the obvious point that observers most often can start to gauge the true significance of an event only once its long-term consequences have begun to emerge. Will the war in Ukraine degenerate into another frustrating, low-level frozen conflict like so many others around the world? Will it lead to new and even more destabilizing aggression by Russia? To nuclear war? Will it cause Putin’s fall from power? At the end of 1991, we knew that whatever else the future held, the pre-1989 communist bloc would not be part of it. We don’t have even that degree of certainty about Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Its outcome, still enormously unpredictable, is what will ultimately determine whether it deserves to mark the end of an era—or something else entirely.
The story used to be told that Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai, on being asked in the early 1970s about the meaning of the French Revolution of 1789, replied: “It is too early to tell.” It has since come to light that he was really talking about the French student revolts of 1968, but there is a reason the story’s original version struck such a chord. It takes time—often a very long time—for the effects of an event to come into reasonable focus. And even then, historians will continue to produce competing interpretations, depending on the perspective they write from and the questions they ask.
We should also remember that history all too often offers up unpleasant surprises. The coming year could be the year of a plague that overshadows even COVID-19. It could be the year of a stock market crash and a second Great Depression. We could, in fact, currently be living in the “prewar period.” Until we know for sure, we won’t know what to make of the past few months, either.

Does Putin’s War Mark a New Period in History?
It has been only two years since the start of another world crisis thought to mark a new era.
Foreign Policy · by David A. Bell · July 1, 2022
By David A. Bell, a professor of history at Princeton University.
Earlier this year, a student asked me how I thought historians would characterize the period of world history he believed had just begun with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. I couldn’t resist replying: “I have no idea. I just hope they won’t be calling it the ‘prewar period.’”
But are we, in fact, at the beginning of a new period in history? Many have been quick to affirm the idea. Even before the invasion began, the Wall Street Journal columnist Gerard Baker was opining that “the crisis over Ukraine … marks the definitive end of the post-Cold War era.” And no sooner had Russian forces crossed the Ukrainian border than the Brookings Institution’s Daniel S. Hamilton agreed: “The post-Cold War period has ended. A more fluid and disruptive era has begun.” A few days later, the political scientist Sean Illing called the invasion a “world-historical event,” adding that “the effects of it will likely ripple out for years to come.” All three were confident that one day, historians would begin new chapters in their textbooks with the year 2022.

This article appears in the Summer 2022 print issue. Subscribe now for unlimited access to FP, plus the print magazine.
Historians themselves, though, have never had a single, obvious, agreed-on way of slicing up history into distinct segments, and they quarrel endlessly about how to do so. Some speak of a “long 18th century” that stretches from 1688 to 1815 and others of a “short 18th century” that runs only from 1715 to 1789. Did the Middle Ages end with the Italian Renaissance in the 14th century or with European voyages of exploration in the 15th? Or perhaps the Reformation in the 16th century? Was there such a thing as a “Global Middle Ages,” or does that term impose a European concept on areas of the world unsuited for it? As long as historians disagree about the relative importance of different factors of historical change—i.e., forever—they will disagree about periodization.
“The pandemic,” Foreign Policy itself proclaimed in March 2020, “will change the world forever.” The actual predictions it elicited on this occasion have, for the most part, stood up quite well. But did 2020 really mark the start of a new era? Today, with the initial shock having receded and with COVID-19 possibly (hopefully) descending to the level of an endemic but manageable disease, its world-changing character seems at least somewhat less apparent.
Even moments of particularly massive, violent upheaval do not necessarily constitute transition points between distinct eras. Adolf Hitler’s invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, might seem one such moment. But many historians argue that World War II had a crucial prologue in the Spanish Civil War that began in 1936. Asian historians often date the start of the war to 1931 and Japan’s invasion of Manchuria. Some historians, including Princeton University’s Arno Mayer, have lumped together both world wars, and the years between them, as the “Second Thirty Years’ War.” The pie of history gets endlessly resliced.
It is the end of wars, and the collapse of regimes, that most reliably marks the end of an era. Historians frequently cite British statesman Edward Grey’s remark, at the start of hostilities in 1914, that “the lamps are going out all over Europe.” But at the time, most Europeans expected what became World War I to last no more than a few months and for it not to cause regime change. It was the end of the war in 1917-18, and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian, German, Ottoman, and Russian empires, that—pace Mayer—marked the clear end of one era and the start of another. A similar point could be made about the end of the Cold War in 1989-91.
The end of the post-Cold War period is far harder to measure. Indeed, it has already been proclaimed many times: with the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999with 9/11with Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgiawith Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimeawith the election of Donald Trump as U.S. president. I would not be at all surprised if, 10 years from now, following some new international horror, a fresh chorus of instant analysts declares it over yet again. Some periodizations are simply more convincing than others. Social scientists frequently call our current era one of “late capitalism,” although that phrase has been in common use since at least the mid-1970s. But as capitalism has stubbornly refused to end, they have no alternative.
Of course, historians do need ways to organize their material chronologically. The pie does need to be sliced. But premature expostulations about how a new era has started all too often amount to nothing but empty rhetorical gestures, reflecting what can only be called “Fukuyama envy.” (You, too, can have your name forever attached to “the end of” something!) Worse, they flatter the egos of dictators like Vladimir Putin, who want nothing more than to be seen as world-historical figures, bending the course of human events to their superhuman will. They also generally require attributing to earlier periods a degree of stability that observers at the time singularly failed to perceive. Calling the era that supposedly began this February more fluid and disruptive than the one that preceded it plays down the enormously disruptive effects attributed at the time, with reason, to the breakup of Yugoslavia, to 9/11, to the Iraq War, to Trump’s election, and to much else.
In the shock and horror that accompany events like the invasion of Ukraine, it is easy to forget the obvious point that observers most often can start to gauge the true significance of an event only once its long-term consequences have begun to emerge. Will the war in Ukraine degenerate into another frustrating, low-level frozen conflict like so many others around the world? Will it lead to new and even more destabilizing aggression by Russia? To nuclear war? Will it cause Putin’s fall from power? At the end of 1991, we knew that whatever else the future held, the pre-1989 communist bloc would not be part of it. We don’t have even that degree of certainty about Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Its outcome, still enormously unpredictable, is what will ultimately determine whether it deserves to mark the end of an era—or something else entirely.
The story used to be told that Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai, on being asked in the early 1970s about the meaning of the French Revolution of 1789, replied: “It is too early to tell.” It has since come to light that he was really talking about the French student revolts of 1968, but there is a reason the story’s original version struck such a chord. It takes time—often a very long time—for the effects of an event to come into reasonable focus. And even then, historians will continue to produce competing interpretations, depending on the perspective they write from and the questions they ask.
We should also remember that history all too often offers up unpleasant surprises. The coming year could be the year of a plague that overshadows even COVID-19. It could be the year of a stock market crash and a second Great Depression. We could, in fact, currently be living in the “prewar period.” Until we know for sure, we won’t know what to make of the past few months, either.
Foreign Policy · by David A. Bell · July 1, 2022


10. The Art of the Arms Race

Excerpts:

All this implies a sharper, tenser competition. Yet a final lesson from the past is that arms-racing can go hand in hand with arms control. Sometimes, the latter abets the former: During the 1970s, Washington used the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty to slow the defensive arms race until the United States had recovered from the Vietnam War and was better prepared to sprint ahead. And the former can also lead to the latter, as Reagan’s experience in the 1980s showed.
Arms control is still a good idea: The extension of New START in 2021 made sense from an arms-racing perspective because Moscow is better positioned to build up its strategic nuclear forces in the near term, even if it will struggle to outpace an economically superior United States over time. And building up to build down is still the right formula. Trilateral agreements to limit intermediate-range missiles, strategic nuclear forces, or the potentially destabilizing applications of AI and other new technologies may eventually become possible—but it will very likely require the United States to demonstrate first that an unconstrained arms race will leave its rivals poorer and more vulnerable in the end.
“The term arms race,” Gray wrote in Foreign Policy’s Winter 1972-73 issue, “suggests hostility, danger and high taxes.” Yet running an arms race may be necessary to avoid uglier outcomes, such as defeat in war or the gradual loss of influence that results from military inferiority. And the rewards of arms-racing can be substantial if an intelligent strategy forces a revisionist adversary to adjust its approach—and perhaps even reconsider its long-term objectives. High-stakes military competitions are already raging today, and the United States badly needs to shape them. An arms race is only futile if you lose.


The Art of the Arms Race
To avoid disaster, the United States must relearn crucial Cold War lessons.
Foreign Policy · by Hal Brands · July 1, 2022
Arms control is dying, and arms races are roaring back to life. Over the past two decades, key pillars of the superpower arms control regime erected during the Cold War have collapsed, one by one: the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, and the Open Skies Treaty. The most important U.S.-Russian agreement that remains, New START, may become a casualty of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine. China, meanwhile, is rapidly building up its conventional and nuclear forces as part of a push for dominance in the Pacific and beyond. Around the globe, emerging technologies are promising dramatic advances in military power.
Welcome to a world primed for arms races—a world in which tensions are sharp, the military balance is hotly contested, and there are ever fewer constraints on which kinds and what quantity of weapons great powers can wield. This new world will, in fact, be replete with challenges reminiscent of an earlier era of rivalry. To avoid disaster, the United States must relearn what it knew during the Cold War: how to arms-race well.

This article appears in the Summer 2022 print issue. Subscribe now for unlimited access to FP, plus the print magazine.
To be sure, arms races—in which two or more rivals compete to secure a favorable military balance—have an awful reputation. At best, they are viewed as a mindless accumulation of weapons or the product of a sinister military-industrial complex and, at worst, as a principal cause of spiraling tensions and cataclysmic war. “[T]he United States is piling up armaments which it well knows will never provide for its ultimate safety,” U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower told his National Security Council in 1956, according to a memo of the meeting. “We are piling up these armaments because we do not know what else to do.”
But arms-racing has unfairly gotten a bad name. As the geopolitical environment becomes nastier, it helps to take a more objective look.
As the United States’ sharpest Cold War thinkers understood, arms-racing is hardly mindless. Preserving a favorable balance of power against an aggressive adversary is the best means of deterring war, not an incitement to it. An arms race, moreover, is a deeply strategic interaction that can be shaped through smart investments and tilted in one’s favor over time. Arms control, finally, is properly seen not as an alternative to arms-racing but as a vital component of a strategy for attaining a competitive edge. Today, the United States has a chance to thrive amid intensifying military rivalries—but doing so will require Washington to reacquaint itself with the art of the arms race.
Arms races are timeless, but the term became commonplace only in the early 20th century. New technologies, such as the dreadnought battleship and the airplane, were creating the potential for rapid shifts in the military balance. Intensifying great-power tensions made the search for military superiority more urgent. In the decades before World War I, for instance, the competition between Britain and a rising Germany played out in a feverish contest to build the most and best battleships.
Yet it was during the Cold War, with the advent of nuclear weapons and the rise of strategic studies as an academic discipline, that our understanding of arms races really matured. Scholars such as Samuel P. Huntington and Colin S. Gray sharpened the definition of an arms race—essentially, an open-ended, back-and-forth contest in which rivals sought to dominate the military balance and reap the strategic rewards that followed. In government and academia, analysts studied the development of the U.S. and Soviet military arsenals and the degree to which moves by one side influenced moves by the other. Amid a long bipolar struggle for supremacy, the intricacies of the superpower arms race became a veritable obsession for intellectuals and policymakers alike.
The U.S.-Soviet military competition, of course, soon took on terrifying proportions. And as Moscow and Washington each acquired the ability to destroy human civilization with nuclear weapons, “arms race” became a term of opprobrium. The nuclear arms race was often seen as an exercise in absurdity—a reminder of how the search for security could cause existential insecurity instead.
The arms control pacts of the 1970s and later were, in part, an effort to reduce this insecurity by capping the superpowers’ nuclear arsenals and constraining those capabilities that were considered destabilizing, such as missile defense systems. (The theory was that one side might more readily consider launching a nuclear first strike if it had the ability to shoot down the other side’s retaliatory barrage of missiles.) The language of mutual assured destruction—the idea that no one could win a nuclear arms race and that it was dangerous to try—became pervasive. “We do not want a nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union,” U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara declared in a 1967 speech. “The action-reaction phenomenon makes it foolish and futile.”
But in reality, things weren’t so simple. “The armaments race,” Eisenhower acknowledged to U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles in 1957, “was a result rather than a cause”: The superpowers armed themselves because they were enemies, not vice versa. Winning the arms race—or at least not losing it—was imperative: The threat of war, or simply of a Western geopolitical collapse, would surely increase if an expansionist rival attained a decisive military edge. The shrewdest observers realized, moreover, that arms-racing was not a foolish, robotic endeavor. It was a discipline that rewarded creative thinking and strategic insight.
Arms-racing has unfairly gotten a bad name. As the geopolitical environment becomes nastier, it helps to take a more objective look.
This more sophisticated U.S. approach to arms-racing was epitomized by Andrew Marshall, a longtime defense intellectual who became the first director of the Office of Net Assessment, the U.S. Defense Department’s in-house think tank that rigorously assessed the military balance. Marshall argued that McNamara’s “action-reaction” model was too simplistic: Soviet and U.S. arms programs reflected historical legacies and bureaucratic biases as much as any tit-for-tat process. More importantly, since Washington could not responsibly avoid a military competition with Moscow, it needed to shape that interaction to its advantage. “[T]he United States will have to outthink the Soviets,” Marshall wrote in 1972, since it could not “continue to outspend them substantially.” The key was making Soviet costs rise and difficulties multiply by identifying “areas of U.S. comparative advantage” and steering “the strategic arms competition into these areas.”
Case in point was the U.S. strategic bomber program. Moscow, Marshall pointed out, had an exaggerated fear of aerial attack, because Adolf Hitler’s Luftwaffe had destroyed much of the Soviet air force on the ground in 1941. By building even a modest bomber fleet, Washington could—and, indeed, did—goad the Kremlin to invest heavily in air defenses, diverting resources from offensive capabilities more threatening to the West. And during the decisive final decade of the Cold War, Marshall’s logic was pervasive: An array of targeted U.S. military investments put great strain on the Soviet Union by negating plans and capabilities that Moscow had assembled at enormous cost.
The development of precision-guided munitions, low-flying cruise missiles, and stealth aircraft upended the Soviet concept of operations in Europe by giving the Pentagon the ability to wreak havoc deep in the enemy’s rear. The deployment of highly accurate intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), along with improved targeting capabilities, threatened Moscow’s plan to keep its leaders alive during a nuclear war by sheltering them in a fantastically expensive bunker complex. U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative—a plan for a space-based missile shield—posed a potentially dire, if distant, peril to the efficacy of the land-based missile force Moscow had spent decades developing. U.S. defense programs, a 1982 Pentagon planning document stated, should “impose disproportionate costs, open up new areas of major military competition and obsolesce previous Soviet investment.”
Contrary to most predictions, aggressive arms-racing actually enabled historic arms control: Reagan’s strategic buildup gave Moscow an incentive to make deep, disproportionate cuts in its arsenal of intermediate-range ballistic missiles and heavy ICBMs. It also put an economically and technologically declining Soviet Union at such a steep competitive deficit that its leaders eventually opted to sue for peace. “If we won’t budge from the positions we’ve held for a long time, we will lose in the end,” Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev conceded in 1986. “We will be drawn into an arms race that we cannot manage.” For the United States, winning the superpower military competition was a prerequisite to winning the larger Cold War.
Washington’s aptitude for arms-racing declined after the Cold War ended: The United States possessed such military dominance that it seemingly had less need for a creative, ruthless strategy. Yet that generous margin of safety is now gone, which means that Washington must master an old discipline anew.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine marked the culmination of a two-decade buildup of conventional and nuclear forces meant to allow Moscow to batter its neighbors while using the threat of nuclear escalation to hold Washington at bay. Russia’s military may have performed abominably in Ukraine, but its conventional and nuclear capabilities—paired with Putin’s increasingly aggressive behavior—will threaten NATO for years to come. China is following a similar playbook by developing power-projection capabilities to coerce its neighbors, anti-access and area denial capabilities to keep U.S. forces at a distance, and a growing nuclear arsenal to deter U.S. policymakers from intervening in the first place. Russia and China have been arming themselves to support their determined programs of geopolitical revisionism—and they have absorbed many lessons about arms-racing the United States has forgotten.
For years, Beijing did not try to match Washington’s military platform-for-platform. It invested in specific capabilities—anti-ship missiles, air defenses, and anti-satellite weapons, to name a few—that threaten the aircraft carriers, communications satellites, and regional bases the United States uses to project power worldwide. Beijing, in other words, has taken Marshall’s advice to heart: It is forging a Chinese way of war that could make the American way of war obsolete, much as Washington made Moscow’s way of war obsolete in the 1980s.
The United States has a chance to thrive amid intensifying military rivalries—but doing so will require Washington to reacquaint itself with the art of the arms race.
There isn’t much relief in sight. If current trends continue, Washington will confront not one but two nuclear peer challengers by decade’s end. Notwithstanding Russia’s losses in Ukraine, the balance of conventional forces along the Eurasian peripheries of the U.S. alliance system will be fraught—if not unfavorable. As during the Cold War, a dangerous military imbalance could tempt U.S. rivals to forcibly contest the status quo, or it could simply eat away at the foundation of confidence on which the U.S. alliance network rests. Preserving U.S. interests will once again require running an arms race—and winning it.
Victory will be partially a matter of money. Even the most brilliant brains cannot forever compensate for a dearth of dollars. The Pentagon will require greater defense spending to preserve a conventional edge vis-à-vis China and Russia simultaneously. It will also need a larger nuclear arsenal to deter two nuclear peers rather than one. Major outlays may be necessary to turn tantalizing technologies—artificial intelligence, quantum computing, synthetic biology—into real capabilities that can be fielded at scale. Military outlays equivalent to at least 5 percent of GDP, as compared with the less than 3.5 percent that the United States currently spends, will probably be the minimum price of peace through this decade and beyond.
But even if the money flows, Washington must also outthink its rivals in order to outperform them.
Outthinking one’s rivals first requires not deceiving oneself. Arms control advocates sometimes argue that Washington should unilaterally limit its own capabilities—whether the development of thermonuclear weapons in 1950 or military applications of AI today—in hopes that adversaries will do likewise. This almost never works.
We now know that a U.S. decision to defer building the hydrogen bomb in the early 1950s would simply have allowed the Soviet Union to build it first. When McNamara halted the U.S. strategic buildup during the 1960s, Moscow raced forward to claim a position of parity. “When we build, they build. When we cut, they build,” U.S. Defense Secretary Harold Brown quipped in 1979. The particular technologies change, but the hard truth doesn’t: Securing restraint from an autocratic adversary typically requires demonstrating that it can’t run an arms race unopposed.
Second, arms-racing effectively requires knowing the enemy intimately. One of Marshall’s insights was that understanding what made the Soviets tick was vital to throwing them off balance. Similarly, there is no good way to make decisions about present-day U.S. military programs without grasping what Russia and China want, what they fear, and how they intend to operate. There are, alas, no shortcuts: During the Cold War, it took a generational investment in Sovietology to get inside the enemy’s head.
This knowledge is so important because an arms race neither requires nor rewards competing equally everywhere. The United States doesn’t need to emulate every Chinese breakthrough in hypersonic weapons. These weapons can’t provide, at a reasonable cost, the volume of firepower Washington would need in the Western Pacific. The Pentagon also shouldn’t match the Kremlin’s vast short-range nuclear arsenal: The United States simply needs enough limited nuclear options to keep adversaries from feeling emboldened to probe the space between U.S. conventional forces and the strategic nuclear arsenal.
The better approach is to think asymmetrically—to use distinct U.S. advantages to disrupt the enemy’s theory of victory and drive up its costs. The way to devalue China’s military buildup vis-à-vis Taiwan, for example, is for Washington and its allies to exploit a key advantage: Defending a rugged island surrounded by rough seas is far easier than conquering it. They should do so by fielding overwhelming numbers of anti-ship missiles, sea mines, unmanned aerial and underwater vehicles, and other cheap capabilities that can turn a cross-strait invasion into a bloody nightmare for Chinese forces. Likewise, if Beijing wants to run an intermediate-range missile race, Washington can use its network of allies to turn a present Chinese advantage into a future liability. After all, U.S. intermediate-range conventional missiles based on allied territory can easily reach the Chinese mainland, whereas Chinese intermediate-range missiles cannot reach the United States. And as China pours more money into aircraft carriers and other large vessels, Washington can hold a generation’s worth of naval modernization at risk by maintaining its edge in undersea warfare. By consistently challenging Beijing’s plans and depreciating its capabilities, Washington can eventually force Chinese leaders to question what an arms race will achieve.
Here, a related rule is helpful: Don’t forget the defensive side of the arms race. Today, as in the past, arms control advocates often claim that ballistic missile defenses are destabilizing, or simply useless, because they can be beaten by cheap countermeasures. Yet U.S. missile defenses are improving rapidly, while the use of directed energy weapons (such as lasers) and other new technologies may soon mitigate problems such as the high cost and limited quantity of interceptors. Fielding limited ballistic missile defenses against Russia and China—not just rogue states like North Korea—can complicate Moscow’s and Beijing’s doctrines of nuclear coercion, which envision using a small number of nuclear strikes to disrupt or deter U.S. intervention in a regional conflict. It can also push Russian and Chinese costs skyward by forcing them to invest more in expensive, novel nuclear delivery vehicles—such as a nuclear-armed submarine drone and other doomsday device-like weapons Putin has brandished—that can defeat missile defenses only at a very high price.
Read More
Mushroom cloud from operation UPSHOT-KNOTHOLE Nevada in 1953
A new nuclear era demands strategy, not just arms control.
Activists march with an inflatable globe during a demonstration against nuclear weapons in Berlin on Nov. 18, 2017.
There are two possible pathways after Ukraine. One of them is harrowing.
Arms races, of course, have both qualitative and quantitative dimensions. That reminds us of another principle: Numbers are not the only things that matter. The key U.S. achievement in the 1980s was to leap ahead even in a situation of numerical parity. Revolutionary improvements in the accuracy of U.S. ICBMs made Soviet officials fear for the survival of their nuclear forces. While it’s clear that Washington’s nuclear arsenal will need to grow in the coming years, maintaining a favorable balance will equally require exploiting U.S. advantages in missile accuracy, ISR (the intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities that provide unparalleled global awareness), and other qualitative factors.
Deterrence, though, is a state of mind: It hinges entirely on what one side thinks the other can and will do. So U.S. policymakers should remember that perception is as important as reality. During the 1980s, the Pentagon used crafty informational strategies—dribbling out news about stealth technology, advertising the ability to sink Soviet nuclear missile submarines, dramatically revealing (and sometimes exaggerating) the effects of precision-guided munitions—to manipulate Moscow’s perceptions of the military balance. This time around, the United States may try to instill caution in Russia or China by demonstrating some sophisticated new capability—or lure them into unrewarding areas by making them fear some technological breakthrough that has not in fact occurred. New technology creates new possibilities, with the cyber field particularly ripe for deception because the true balance of capabilities is so difficult to know.
All this implies a sharper, tenser competition. Yet a final lesson from the past is that arms-racing can go hand in hand with arms control. Sometimes, the latter abets the former: During the 1970s, Washington used the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty to slow the defensive arms race until the United States had recovered from the Vietnam War and was better prepared to sprint ahead. And the former can also lead to the latter, as Reagan’s experience in the 1980s showed.
Arms control is still a good idea: The extension of New START in 2021 made sense from an arms-racing perspective because Moscow is better positioned to build up its strategic nuclear forces in the near term, even if it will struggle to outpace an economically superior United States over time. And building up to build down is still the right formula. Trilateral agreements to limit intermediate-range missiles, strategic nuclear forces, or the potentially destabilizing applications of AI and other new technologies may eventually become possible—but it will very likely require the United States to demonstrate first that an unconstrained arms race will leave its rivals poorer and more vulnerable in the end.
“The term arms race,” Gray wrote in Foreign Policy’s Winter 1972-73 issue, “suggests hostility, danger and high taxes.” Yet running an arms race may be necessary to avoid uglier outcomes, such as defeat in war or the gradual loss of influence that results from military inferiority. And the rewards of arms-racing can be substantial if an intelligent strategy forces a revisionist adversary to adjust its approach—and perhaps even reconsider its long-term objectives. High-stakes military competitions are already raging today, and the United States badly needs to shape them. An arms race is only futile if you lose.
Foreign Policy · by Hal Brands · July 1, 2022


11. British Army hit by cyberattack as Twitter and YouTube accounts hacked

British Army hit by cyberattack as Twitter and YouTube accounts hacked
Defence sources would not comment on whether Russians could be responsible
The Telegraph · by Danielle Sheridan,
The British Army has confirmed a "breach" of its Twitter and YouTube accounts.
The Ministry of Defence said an investigation is under way after both official sites appeared to have been hacked.
The Army's YouTube channel features videos on cyptocurrency and images of billionaire businessman Elon Musk, while its official Twitter account retweeted a number of posts appearing to relate to crypto assets known as NFTs.
The profile picture on its twitter page was changed numerous times during the hack, and at one point showed a monkey wearing face paint. The bio was replaced with the message: “We all have a dark side. What will yours look like?”
Defence sources would not comment on whether Russians were behind the hack.
Hacking of soldiers’ details has been a feature of the war in Ukraine, with hacker group Anonymous claiming to have released the personal details of 120,000 Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine in early April.

A screengrab of a tweet that was retweeted by the British Army Twitter site after it was hacked
The British Army cyber attack is the latest hacking incident to affect the organisation. Britain’s computerised army recruitment system closed in mid-March after candidate data was compromised in a possible hack, which resulted in officials deciding to suspend its operations. Data relating to an estimated 120 army recruits was discovered being offered for sale on the dark web.
In 2019, the Army announced it would engage in social media warfare, as it launched a new division of the military dedicated to fighting cyber threats. The purpose of 6 Division (6 Div), is to seek to influence the behaviour of the public and adversaries by specialising in “information warfare”. It is expected to react to social media "attacks" on Britain, and proactively launch similar offensives.
The account was subsequently flooded by a series of retweets encouraging followers to enter competitions to win NFTs - digital artworks that represent real-life assets such as music and videos.
It appeared to take the army about five hours to regain control of its Twitter account.

A screengrab of the British Army YouTube site after it was hacked Credit: PA/PA
One senior defence source said they did not believe the hackings would have been a “national security threat”, due to the nature of the platforms.
An Army spokesman said: "We are aware of a breach of the Army's Twitter and YouTube accounts and an investigation is under way.
"We take information security extremely seriously and are resolving the issue. Until the investigation is complete it would be inappropriate to comment further."
It follows a string of high-profile hacks in 2020, when Bill Gates, Elon Musk and Joe Biden’s accounts were taken over by scammers.

The Telegraph · by Danielle Sheridan,



12. Only 12 Army Rangers who served in World War II are still alive, and they just received Congress' highest award for achievement


Only 12 Army Rangers who served in World War II are still alive, and they just received Congress' highest award for achievement
Business Insider · by Stavros Atlamazoglou

US Army Rangers run through a wall of fire training in 1943.
Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images
  • The White House and Congress recently recognized the US Army Ranger veterans of World War II.
  • Rangers played a crucial role in some of the war's most important battles, including D-Day.
  • Of the 7,000 Rangers who fought in World War II, only a dozen are still alive to receive the award.

The White House and Congress recently recognized the few remaining World War II veterans of a legendary special-operations unit.
In June, President Joe Biden signed legislation awarding the Congressional Gold Medal to US Army Rangers who fight in some of its the war's most important battles.
The medals, one of the US's highest civilian awards, "is going to go to US Army Ranger veterans of World War II — Rangers who played a crucial role in the D-Day invasion in Normandy," Biden said in a ceremony on June 7.
"This elite group once numbered 7,000, but now it's down to 12. A dozen left. On behalf of our nation, we want to thank them for their heroism and their service," Biden added.
The Rangers forged their legacy on the plains of Europe and in the jungles of Asia during World War II, and two operations best reflect their contribution to the Allied victory.
Pointe du Hoc

The ropes and ladders the Rangers used to scale the cliffs of Point du Hoc, seen in a photo released on June 12, 1944.
US Navy
One of the most daring operations in Ranger history took place during the D-Day landings on June 6, 1944.
Allied forces landed on five beaches — Sword, Juno, Gold, Omaha, and Utah. US troops were responsible for Omaha and Utah beaches, which are separated by Pointe du Hoc, a strategically located cliff overlooking both beaches.
The Germans had fortified Pointe du Hoc with heavy artillery that could be deadly to US troops on the beaches and to Allied warships supporting the invasion.
To neutralize the German threat, Allied commanders assigned Lt. Col. James Rudder's 2nd Ranger Battalion and its 200 Rangers to take down the German position before the landings began.

US troops relieve the US Army Rangers at Pointe du Hoc as German prisoners are led away, June 8, 1944.
On D-Day, Allied aircraft and ships launched more than 630 tons of munitions against Pointe du Hoc in an attempt to suppress the German defenders ahead of the main landings. The bombardment failed to destroy the German guns and fortifications and tore up the ground and cliffs around the German positions, complicating the Rangers' assault plans.
To get to the German positions, the Rangers had to climb sheer 100-foot cliffs while under German fire. The US commandos used ropes and ladders to get to the top, where they stormed and destroyed the artillery emplacements. However, the Germans counterattacked in force, pinning down the Rangers.
By the second day of the invasion, the Rangers had suffered more than 50% casualties and had only about 90 men still able to fight. The Germans tried to dislodge the Rangers and throw them back into the water with repeated counterattacks, but the American commandos held fast, and on the third day of the invasion, reinforcements finally arrived to relieve them.
Cabanatuan

US Army Rangers who participated in the raid on the Cabanatuan prison camp to free Allied prisoners of war, February 16, 1945.
Bettmann/Getty Images
Army Rangers distinguished themselves again a few months later and thousands of miles away.
At the end of 1944, the tide of the war in the Pacific was changing in favor of the Allies. Japan's army and navy were on the defensive, and Allied forces were recapturing island after island. Amid their retreat, Japanese troops continued and, in some cases, increased their war crimes.
In December 1944, as US troops were advancing in the Philippines, Japanese troops shot or burned alive 139 Allied prisoners of war, many of whom had survived the infamous Bataan Death March.
A few Americans escaped the killing and reported the atrocities to approaching Allied forces. US commanders realized that other Allied prisoners of war faced imminent execution. The Cabanatuan prison camp in the Philippines was the largest in the region, holding more than 500 Allied POWs.
On January 30, 1945, some 120 Alamo Scouts and Rangers from the 6th Ranger Battalion, supported by 200 Filipino guerrillas, launched a rescue operation. To get to Cabanatuan, the commandos had to march 30 miles behind enemy lines.

US troops liberated from Cabanatuan prison by US Army Rangers wait for transfer to a base hospital.
CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images
Once in place, they attacked the camp from the front and flank, catching the Japanese guards unawares. The surprise was complete, and shortly Rangers had rescued all the Allied POWs there.
The Cabanatuan raid is the largest prisoner-of-war rescue in US special-operations history.
One of the Rangers present, Maj. Arthur "Bull" Simons, become a legend in the special-operations community and took in Operation Ivory Coast, the special-operations prisoner-rescue attempt at Son Tay prison camp in North Vietnam. US Special Operations Command recognizes its top member every year with the Bull Simons Award.
Today, the legacy of those commandos lives on in the 75th Ranger Regiment, the world's premier light infantry special-operations unit and an integral part of the US special-operations arsenal. Rangers are the go-to special-operations unit for most contingencies and are one of the few US military units that has been continuously deployed since the September 11 attacks.
Stavros Atlamazoglou is a defense journalist specializing in special operations, a Hellenic Army veteran (national service with the 575th Marine Battalion and Army HQ), and a Johns Hopkins University graduate.

Business Insider · by Stavros Atlamazoglou


13. The few, the proud, the drunk: Meet America’s revolutionary yet ‘ungentlemanlike’ troops of 1776


One helluva bar tab.

Excerpts:

And if you’re thinking this was just the enlisted soldiers, it went up to the commanders as well. In 1787, George Washington and several of his friends from the Army were celebrating the signing of the U.S. Constitution and decided to, what else, get drunk. At least 55 people, but definitely no more than 100, bought dozens of bottles of wine, jugs of beer, alcoholic punch and cider for good measure. Seriously, there’s the receipt to prove it. According to adjustments, that bill today is more than $17,000.
It’s unlikely that the call of “Remember Valley Forge” was to bring up memories of a bad hangover. But a few revolutionaries probably had those thoughts. So if you’re enjoying a drink this Fourth of July weekend, know that the original American army also liked its drink. And could likely drink you under the table. Drink responsibly – the revolutionaries apparently didn’t.


The few, the proud, the drunk: Meet America’s revolutionary yet ‘ungentlemanlike’ troops of 1776
Give me liberty or give me a bar tab.

BY NICHOLAS SLAYTON | PUBLISHED JUL 3, 2022 5:28 PM
taskandpurpose.com · by Nicholas Slayton · July 3, 2022
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This might be an obvious statement, but armies like to drink. That’s true now, and it was true nearly 250 years ago when the Continental Army fought in the American Revolution.
It’s the Fourth of July weekend and soldiers, veterans and Americans around the country are celebrating the founding fathers, the revolution and all of the related elements tied up in the holiday. But it’s also worth remembering that the original American soldiers liked to drink. A lot. So much so. This isn’t an exaggeration.
The Journal of the American Revolution dived into the documented cases of the Continental Army not only getting its hands on booze, but going overboard and getting into trouble thanks to it. That ranged from enlisted soldiers beating an officer, drunken gambling on days of rest and other forms of insubordination. The soldiers were considered “ungentlemanlike” for their actions. Soldiers would raid captured officers’ stores of alcohol, threaten store owners for more than their daily ration and get into fights with one another while plastered.
At the time the American Revolutionary War started, alcohol was both a part of military life – alcohol rations were a common practice – and booze such as beer was considered safer to drink than many sources of water. George Washington himself tried to make soldiers avoid alcohol with threats of punishment, but an army of young revolutionaries gathered together and away from home found ways to not only get their hands on alcohol but get large amounts of it, as part of the fight against the British. And it was a wide range of drinks. The Continental Army and Patriot militias might not have Navy grog, but it had regional beer, pilfered wine, cider, whiskey, applejack and other spirits.
Hey, Samuel Adams was a brewer, remember?
It wasn’t just the camp activities the Continental Army engaged in that were “ungentlemanlike.” The soldiers even factoring in the universal love soldiers have for booze into tactical plans. As War on the Rocks notes, George Washington’s army expected the British-employed Hessian mercenaries in Trenton to drink heavily for Christmas celebrations. American beer being different and more potent than that in Europe, Washington was counting on the Hessians to be utterly wasted and hungover, if they were even awake at dawn. When the Continental Army attacked and routed the Hessians at Trenton on Christmas Day, the soldiers were unexpectedly sober.
It might not be cases of cheap beer on base to wash down a day of Rip Its, but for a hard-scrapped army often struggling with morale, supplies and funding, and going up against the much more resourceful British army, the Americans’ ability to source and consume booze is impressive.
And if you’re thinking this was just the enlisted soldiers, it went up to the commanders as well. In 1787, George Washington and several of his friends from the Army were celebrating the signing of the U.S. Constitution and decided to, what else, get drunk. At least 55 people, but definitely no more than 100, bought dozens of bottles of wine, jugs of beer, alcoholic punch and cider for good measure. Seriously, there’s the receipt to prove it. According to adjustments, that bill today is more than $17,000.
It’s unlikely that the call of “Remember Valley Forge” was to bring up memories of a bad hangover. But a few revolutionaries probably had those thoughts. So if you’re enjoying a drink this Fourth of July weekend, know that the original American army also liked its drink. And could likely drink you under the table. Drink responsibly – the revolutionaries apparently didn’t.
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taskandpurpose.com · by Nicholas Slayton · July 3, 2022

​14. The Strategy of the Mind: Maoism and Culture War in the West


Excerpts:

Key to the idea of culture war is the understanding that the space to be conquered to gain and retain power is not necessarily the physical battlefield but the intangible sphere of the mind. The Maoist conception of the strategic utility of the mind, and its capacity to be moulded towards the waging of cultural warfare, presents some interesting challenges to traditional Western notions of strategic formulation, as this essay will endeavour to show.
...
Dissecting the direct and indirect intellectual influences of Maoist thought on Western radicalism reveals, as this essay discloses, a very different construction of the strategic realm than that which has traditionally constituted the basis of Western political conduct.
...
Clausewitz’s reflections on the philosophical origins and purposes of war present intriguing parallels with Mao’s writings on the unity of opposites and the perpetual struggle between contradictions. It may be of some interest that there remains a continuing historical debate as to whether Mao might have read and been influenced by Clausewitz.[xiii] Pondering Clausewitz’s potential influence on Mao it is possible to contradict his oft-cited maxim that ‘political power grows out of the barrel of a gun’.[xiv]
Mao undoubtedly approved of revolutionary violence ‘whereby one class overthrows another’.[xv] ‘Only with guns can the world be transformed’, he wrote.[xvi] His injunction about power growing out of the barrel of a gun was, though, issued principally in order to reiterate the necessity of retaining political control over the means of violence as the following sentence reminded his audience at the Sixth Plenary Session of the Communist Party’s Sixth Central Committee in November 1938: ‘Our principle is that the Party commands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command the Party’.[xvii]
In fact, if we accept that there is an overlap between Clausewitz’s thinking about the result in war never being final and war as a continuation of politics with Mao’s contentions regarding the continuous struggle between contradictions, then it suggests, logically, that political power does not only grow out of the barrel of a gun, as a Mao’s phrase might suggest, but rather that it grows out of the passions, fears, and moral beliefs held within the minds of individuals. This reading, moreover, would seem to fit more accurately with Mao’s understanding of the cognitive sources of revolutionary struggle, as stated in his 1937 tract, On Practice, where he maintained: ‘Cognition starts with practice and through practice it reaches the theoretical plane, and then it has to go back to practice’.[xviii]
​...
Whatever else Maoism may be in a Western setting, it repudiates the liberal understanding of politics, which draws a separation between the personal and the political. Maoist understandings of the private sphere reject this view and hold that the un-curated mind is a barrier to social transformation and needs to be sanitised of all impurities. Politicising the private realm is precisely what Maoist strategic conduct aspires to. Mao made no secret of his aversion to liberalism. He despised its civility, its willingness to hear ‘incorrect views without rebutting them’, and its latitude for permitting ‘irresponsible criticism in private’.[xxviii] Whatever one’s viewpoint on contemporary political and cultural developments, there should be few illusions, Western Maoism seeks to eliminate the liberal-democratic conception of the West.
The Strategy of the Mind: Maoism and Culture War in the West - Military Strategy Magazine
David Martin Jones, M.L.R. Smith
The political condition within Western societies has, in recent years, increasingly been cast in terms of a ‘culture war’ between radically opposed value systems: between those that want to preserve a pluralistic society where the right to freedom of expression is upheld against those who believe that society should be protected from offensive behaviours and ‘hate-speech’, which are embedded within systems of structural discrimination and oppression.
What has this condition got to do with the ghost of the Chinese communist leader Mao Tse-tung? More than one might think. The legacy of Mao’s struggle for power in China, and his strategic formulations for winning power, casts a long – and little understood – shadow over contemporary political conduct in the nations that constitute the liberal-democratic West. Of all the strands of modern political theorising that may be said to influence current Western political conduct, it was Mao, above all, who articulated and put into practice ideas of so-called cultural warfare. Key to the idea of culture war is the understanding that the space to be conquered to gain and retain power is not necessarily the physical battlefield but the intangible sphere of the mind. The Maoist conception of the strategic utility of the mind, and its capacity to be moulded towards the waging of cultural warfare, presents some interesting challenges to traditional Western notions of strategic formulation, as this essay will endeavour to show.
Discerning the Strategic Dynamics
Although the notion of culture war is not new, its salience has heightened since 2016, and turned into actual violence in the United States and the UK in May/June 2020. The death of George Floyd at the hands of police in the US city of Minneapolis was the immediate cause of the violence. Arguably, however, it was the long-term consequence and logical escalation of forces that had been brewing in US and UK polities for the better part of six decades.
The manifestation of the culture war took the form of riots and civil disturbances across US cities, as well assaults upon public statues, heritage sites and icons. In non-violent form culture war continues in the felt need to ‘decolonise’ the alleged structures of oppression, from the secondary and tertiary curriculums of schools and universities to libraries, health services, the police, the armed forces, and to just about everything.
The motive towards cultural iconoclasm and the impetus to destroy an inconvenient past is something that should concern strategic theorists. After all, the role of strategic theory is to render explicit what is implicit in our social surroundings by identifying the purpose and the means that impel political actors towards actions that seek to fulfil ideological goals.[i] Yet few analysts, have sought to uncover the strategic dynamics at work in the culture war currently convulsing Anglophone institutions.
Looking at the philosophical creed that seeks confrontation with the Anglo-American liberal democratic project, we see the work of the radical Left, a broad movement dedicated to advancing notions of social egalitarianism that ultimately has no interest in the preservation of the existing structures of society. Unlike the constitutional or social democrat Left, the radical Left does not accept the legitimacy of the current capitalist democratic order. It is prepared to engage with the structures of that order to exploit its fault lines and expose its weaknesses with a view to overthrowing it.
How to advance towards the new social order has seen radical Left theorists develop a profound interest in matters of strategy, often attending carefully to the methods necessary to bring about the conditions for revolution. The strategy of cultural warfare on the part of the contemporary radical Left comprises an amalgam of many different strains of thought, from Vladimir Lenin to Antonio Gramsci, to Herbert Marcuse. However, this essay focuses on the underappreciated influence of Mao Tse-tung’s thinking on the strategy of cultural warfare in the West.
Maoist ideas of revolutionary war have filtered into Western political discourse ever since the late 1930s when Chinese communist forces, holed up in the caves of Yenan in the remote Shensi province after the Long March, attracted the attention of sympathetic American journalists, like Edgar Snow and Anne Louise Strong, eager to broadcast Mao’s struggles to the wider world. During this period Mao and his acolytes scrutinised the failures of former Communist strategy, extending back to the 1920s, which had initially sought to stimulate revolution through urban uprisings, before being forced out of its Kiangsi Soviet and onto the Long March in 1934/35. It was in Yenan that Mao and his comrades cultivated their vision of the revolutionary persona necessary to withstand the rigours of long-term political struggle.
The victory of the communists in 1949, but especially the impact of the Cultural Revolution after 1966, drew further Western adherents, who were attracted to Maoist ideas of revolutionary purification. Mao’s thinking had a particular impact upon a generation of French intellectuals that, in part, constitute what is often termed the New Left – Alain Badiou, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, among others. The New Left looked to sources of inspiration like Mao to reinvigorate communist thinking from its moribund condition following the revelations of Stalinist excesses in the Soviet Union. Largely via their reflections, Maoist ideas of cultural struggle arrived upon the shores of American campuses in the late 1960s. And never left.
Dissecting the direct and indirect intellectual influences of Maoist thought on Western radicalism reveals, as this essay discloses, a very different construction of the strategic realm than that which has traditionally constituted the basis of Western political conduct.
Maoist Thought Confronts Western Strategic Formulation
The principal difference in strategic approach resides in the Maoist conception of the self and its manipulation as a latent source of power. As Philip Short wrote: ‘Stalin cared about what his subjects did (or might do); Hitler, about who they were; Mao cared about what they thought’.[ii] How the mind could be moulded towards revolutionary ends was to become highly influential upon the theorists of the New Left.
In contrast to liberal-democratic notions of the individual self and its autonomy, Maoist thought devotes considerable attention to addressing how to break down the barriers between the interior and external worlds in a manner that undermines established Western understandings of politics to a degree often overlooked in appreciations of strategic formulation. In that regard, Maoist ideas open up possibilities little understood either among scholars of strategy or mainstream political practitioners.
Strategy can be understood as the endeavour to relate means to ends: the use of available resources to gain defined objectives,[iii] encompassing the attempt to maximise interests with available resources.[iv] Actions are thus consciously intended to have utility. They are intended to achieve goals and therefore are constructed with a purpose. Strategy is, then, an inherently practical subject, concerned with translating aspirations into realisable objectives. Strategy, as Colin Gray explained, functions as the ‘bridge’ between tactics, that is, actions on the ground, and the broader political effects that they are intended to produce.[v] From this perspective, we can analyse the challenges and possibilities that Maoism poses for strategic conduct in a Western liberal democratic setting.
Strategy as objectively observable
The conception of strategy as a goal-orientated enterprise thus delineates a pragmatic concern with realising tangible objectives with available means. In its intellectual and operational manifestations, therefore, strategy concentrates on practices as physically observable phenomenon. Strategy is revealed and evaluated in relation to material facts, acts and outcomes: political mobilization, armed clashes, organised violence, plans, battles, campaigns, victories and defeats. Simply put, a successful strategy can usually be gauged by real world effects that are clear and demonstrable: objectives achieved, battles won, victories secured.
Strategy as a method of completion
Focusing on achieving empirically observable outcomes, strategy, as traditionally conceived, has little to say about the mind: the sphere of the self of private thoughts, reflections and beliefs. Strategy, conventionally understood, is about transforming an idea – a desire to achieve an objective – into reality. Strategy, in this sense, is a movement from inception to completion. The desire for completion, winning in war or attaining any other goal, reflects the wish to make something final, that is, to reach a definitive end that will be hard to question or undo. Moreover, a physically observable aftermath demonstrating the achievement of aims validates that final completion. Where the aim might arise in the individual or collective consciousness is something in which the study of strategy has evinced little interest.
The political distinction between war and peace
This conception of strategy as something that is focused on achieving tangible outcomes also reflects the clear distinction often drawn in Western political thought between the state of war and peace. Although, of course, professional thinkers on strategy, military planners and policy makers, do not see strategy as simply a wartime activity, the point is that the liberal conception of war is regarded as a largely negative consequence of the public breakdown of civil or inter-state relations, requiring a decision to be reached through force of arms.[vi] By contrast, ‘peace’ is war’s antithesis – the absence of fighting – and an altogether more preferable state of affairs.
Indifference to the private sphere
Yet where ‘fighting thoughts’ come from in the first place is rarely, if ever, examined in Western strategic discourse. This dichotomy itself reflects understandings in Western philosophy concerning the self. Modern philosophy begins with René Descartes’ mind-body dualism and the method of doubt.[vii] Seventeenth century liberal thought gradually came to treat the mind as an internal sphere free from the legal and confessional controls imposed on external behaviour (the Catholic Church was very happy to examine men’s souls as was the Puritan version of election). This was for seventeenth century materialists a function of the body, whether it was the arm that threw the stone or the mouth that uttered an insult.
This mind-body dualism in Western thought over time came to delineate, at least in England, the separation of the private from the public realm, which in turn established the grounds of social contract theory and the ‘cultural inheritance’ of Western liberalism. Through a series of unintended consequences, it enabled a more liberal and rationally enlightened polity to develop. In essence, so long as subjects acknowledged their temporal allegiance to the constitutional monarch or the republic, the state would not seek to look into men’s souls.
Over time, the quid pro quo of outward conformity in return for the state’s indifference to the private beliefs of its subjects enabled a political language and practice of individualism. Inexorably, the idea of the liberal democratic state as a container of individual legal rights, including the right to free speech and dissent became normalised.
Although the concept of the private self was to be challenged by the growth of the administrative state and totalitarian ideologies during the twentieth century, the notion of the self-regarding autonomous individual – endowed with the vote and a right to political participation – remained the foundational condition of the Western liberal polity.
The Concept of Universal Struggle
In contrast, Mao sought control of the mind collectively and individually for the purposes of creating revolution. His strategic novelty in this respect resides in the challenge posed to notions of finality and completion in Western strategic discourse. For Mao, there was no endpoint, no single decisive victory, only endless struggle; a condition embodied in the phrase often ascribed to Mao (and Leon Trotsky) of ‘permanent revolution’.
Mao elaborated his thinking about the ceaseless nature of struggle in On Contradiction (1937). He asserted that the ‘interdependence of the contradictory aspects present in all things and the struggle between these aspects determine the life of all things and push their development forward’. For Mao, ‘contradiction exists universally and in all processes, whether in the simple or in the complex forms of motion, whether in objective phenomena or ideological phenomena’.[viii]
The implication of Mao’s ideas were that the interior realm of thought and belief was a site of contestation, and constituted the key to revolutionary progress because ‘Contradiction is universal and absolute, it is present in the process of development of all things, and permeates every process from beginning to end’. ‘The old unity with its constituent opposites’, Mao continued, ‘yields to a new unity with its constituent opposites, whereupon a new process emerges to replace the old. The old process ends and the new one begins. The new process contains new contradictions and begins its own history of the development of contradictions’.[ix]
Mao’s thinking about the universal struggle of contradictions confronts Western strategic understandings about the separation of the physically observable from the intangible. Mao was not, however, the first to make the connection between the material and the intangible elements of strategy.
Did Clausewitz Get There First?
Carl von Clausewitz is perhaps the one figure in the Western strategic tradition to challenge the notion of strategic completion. Clausewitz’s notion of the trinitarian theory is often associated far more with the ‘passions’ than the mind.[x] However, there are intimations, albeit somewhat inchoate, that he intuitively grasped the inherent power of the interior realm. In a short and under-analysed passage in On War, he observed: ‘The result in war is never final’. He continued: ‘even the outcome of a war is not always to be regarded as final. The defeated state often considers the outcome merely a transitory evil, for which a remedy may still be found in political conditions at some later date’.[xi]
What Clausewitz may or may not have meant by this passage is rendered opaque by the lack of much in the way of further elucidation. Consequently, we are, like quite a lot of Clausewitz’s incomplete thoughts, left to infer what he might have been hinting at or ‘read in’ what we – that is, Clausewitz’s modern interpreters – wish to see. Clearly, he was writing about his own experiences in the Napoleonic wars where the defeat of his beloved Prussia in 1806, did not turn out to be final. Likewise, the defeat of Napoleon in 1814 following the Battle of Paris did not turn out to be conclusive but arguably was in 1815 after the Battle of Waterloo. Nevertheless, Clausewitz’s theoretical point is that the seeds of resistance are always present that might one day disturb or overturn the status quo. This holds true even in instances where no further attempt is made to violently contest the political conclusion in war. For example, the defeat and dismemberment of Germany after 1945 may have been categorical, but it did not stop Germany from re-uniting in 1990. In politics, all is change: and the political conditions wrought even by resounding victories or defeats are always, and can only be, provisional.
Thus, although Clausewitz did not enlarge upon his observation, it intimated that he, like Mao, considered that the conduct of war was not reducible to physical phenomena, but entailed an interior dimension that is obscured by the strategic focus upon the construction of visible means to reach a terminating point where fighting stopped, and peace began. Clausewitz’s other famous aphorism, that ‘war is a continuation of political intercourse, carried on with other means’,[xii] also implied that war is simply the overt expression of different interests generated by the internal clash of popular passions. Politics, in this rendition, is the sublimation of a continuous struggle made manifest.
In stating that the result in war is never final, Clausewitz contests conventional expectations that war and strategy is only about clinical endings and beginnings. War begins in the mind and does not necessarily cease with declarations of victory or defeat. Clausewitz infers that decisive outcomes in war are, in fact, inherently uncertain, unstable, and indeed may contain unresolved contradictions that could see war recur as a consequence of continued mindful resistance to the status quo. Internal resistance may at some point break out into open physical violence once more. For that reason, the results in war remain impermanent because they create, to paraphrase Mao, new conditions and therefore new contradictions in which conflict can arise.
Political Power Grows Out of the Mind, Not the Gun
Clausewitz’s reflections on the philosophical origins and purposes of war present intriguing parallels with Mao’s writings on the unity of opposites and the perpetual struggle between contradictions. It may be of some interest that there remains a continuing historical debate as to whether Mao might have read and been influenced by Clausewitz.[xiii] Pondering Clausewitz’s potential influence on Mao it is possible to contradict his oft-cited maxim that ‘political power grows out of the barrel of a gun’.[xiv]
Mao undoubtedly approved of revolutionary violence ‘whereby one class overthrows another’.[xv] ‘Only with guns can the world be transformed’, he wrote.[xvi] His injunction about power growing out of the barrel of a gun was, though, issued principally in order to reiterate the necessity of retaining political control over the means of violence as the following sentence reminded his audience at the Sixth Plenary Session of the Communist Party’s Sixth Central Committee in November 1938: ‘Our principle is that the Party commands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command the Party’.[xvii]
In fact, if we accept that there is an overlap between Clausewitz’s thinking about the result in war never being final and war as a continuation of politics with Mao’s contentions regarding the continuous struggle between contradictions, then it suggests, logically, that political power does not only grow out of the barrel of a gun, as a Mao’s phrase might suggest, but rather that it grows out of the passions, fears, and moral beliefs held within the minds of individuals. This reading, moreover, would seem to fit more accurately with Mao’s understanding of the cognitive sources of revolutionary struggle, as stated in his 1937 tract, On Practice, where he maintained: ‘Cognition starts with practice and through practice it reaches the theoretical plane, and then it has to go back to practice’.[xviii]
Mind Control
Given Mao’s interest in unlocking the revolutionary potential of collective action, it followed that controlling the mind was the key to unleashing the power of mass resistance. Maoist ideas opened the strategic possibility of exerting control over the private sphere as a tool of struggle and revolt. Mao’s ruminations on how the interior world could be instrumentalised towards revolutionary emancipation offer a systematic philosophy of the human mind as both perfectible and perfectly malleable. The Maoist conception proceeds methodically from the assumption that under capitalism and imperialism the mind is polluted by cultural accretions requiring permanent rectification and purification if the collective will of the masses is to be made strategically useful.
Maoism seeks purification for a purpose, to make control of the interior realm strategically instrumental. Mao emphasised that the final stage of cognition was ‘the leap from rational knowledge to revolutionary practice’. Having ‘grasped the laws of the world’, Mao stated, ‘we must redirect this knowledge to the practice of revolutionary class struggle and national struggle’.[xix] The imperative for revolutionaries in this respect was, first and foremost, not to wage violent struggle, but to ‘reconstruct their own subjective world, that is, to remold their faculty of knowing; and to change the relations between the subjective and external worlds’. Finally, he added: ‘When the whole of mankind of its own accord remolds itself and changes the world, that will be the age of world communism’.[xx]
What Mao Should Be Remembered For
When analysts consider Mao’s contribution to strategic thought they tend to focus on his three-stage theory of people’s war to win power. Arguably, though, his most original and influential contribution lies in his understanding of the latent power that can be instrumentalised through mind control. As Apter and Saich state, Mao’s goal ‘was nothing less than the generating of new modes of power: the power of discourse’.[xxi]
Tracing the evolution of Maoism in the West, it is possible to perceive how 1960s radicals began to redirect their thinking towards Mao’s ideas on cognition and the generation of ‘alternative’ modes of power. As disillusion with the armed struggle set in during the early 1970s, radicals moved to embrace other methods. As Collier and Horowitz noted of the Maoist inspired Black Panthers: ‘The Party no longer seemed to believe now that power grew out of the barrel of a gun but from community organizing’.[xxii] By adopting such means, the Panthers were not abandoning Mao’s tenets but rather moving towards his position on cognition as a means to elevate the revolutionary spirit by reshaping the external environment.
As the era of violent ‘direct action’ subsided in the course of the 1980s, Maoist ideas of social control and thought reform gained currency in activist circles. Bill Tupman, a Marxist scholar explained in 1991: ‘The young revolutionary has only the one place to run to. Maoism gives people something to do: Trotskyism was about waiting around and selling newspapers. I see it coming back in a big way’.[xxiii] Channelling the Maoist appeal to ‘do’, finds its expression across the modern campus Left with academics asserting that universities should act ‘as missionaries, teaching new ideas’ that ‘enable active citizenship and even inspire some to take up activist roles’.[xxiv]
The instrumentalization of the socially re-constructed mind toward activist roles, and committed towards waging cultural warfare, is pure Maoism in action. In its applied ‘critical theory’ guise, it focuses on ‘controlling discourses, especially by problematising language and imagery it deems theoretically harmful’, in a manner that leads to the scrutiny, rectification and policing of thought.[xxv] This social activist mindset percolates from the universities to the wider professional and business world beyond. From schools to media services, to multinational corporations, ‘Organizations and activist groups of all kinds announce that they are inclusive, but only of people who agree with them’.[xxvi] In his 1937 tract, ‘On the correct handling of contradictions’, Mao explained how to address incorrect, ‘non-Marxist’, ideas. ‘As far as unmistakeable counter-revolutionaries and saboteurs of the socialist cause are concerned, the matter is easy, we simply deprive them of their freedom of speech’.[xxvii]
Conclusion: Harnessing the Power of the Private Sphere
Obviously, the notion of culture wars and the impact of Mao’s thinking on contemporary political practices in the West is a vast subject, and at best one can only draw attention to its general contours in a brief essay such as this. This short article has therefore sought to illustrate how the all-pervasive thought and language policing within public and private institutions in evidence across the Anglosphere attests to the little understood influence of Maoist strategic ideas. His proto-constructivist writings on how perceptions of the exterior world can be re-ordered by changing one’s subjective cognition may be found in any number of contemporary social science texts in Western academic literature, and which in many other respects provides the fuel for culture war. Whether or not one regards these developments as a progressive good, the ideas regarding the harnessing of the power of the internal sphere as a latent realm of power represents Mao’s most innovative contribution to strategic thought, more so than his writings on guerrilla warfare. Certainly, it represents his most enduring influence on the post-modern West.
Whatever else Maoism may be in a Western setting, it repudiates the liberal understanding of politics, which draws a separation between the personal and the political. Maoist understandings of the private sphere reject this view and hold that the un-curated mind is a barrier to social transformation and needs to be sanitised of all impurities. Politicising the private realm is precisely what Maoist strategic conduct aspires to. Mao made no secret of his aversion to liberalism. He despised its civility, its willingness to hear ‘incorrect views without rebutting them’, and its latitude for permitting ‘irresponsible criticism in private’.[xxviii] Whatever one’s viewpoint on contemporary political and cultural developments, there should be few illusions, Western Maoism seeks to eliminate the liberal-democratic conception of the West.
References
[i] See Matthew Clapperton, David Martin Jones and M.L.R. Smith, ‘Iconoclasm and Strategic Thought: Islamic State and Cultural Heritage in Iraq and Syria’, International Affairs, Vol. 93, No. 5 (2017), pp. 1205-1231.
[ii] Quoted in Timothy S. Chung, ‘In search of Mao Zedong – two views of history’. Taipei Times, 25 May 2000, http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/archives/2000/05/25/0000037415, (accessed 29 April 2021).
[iii] Michael Howard, The Causes of Wars (London: Counterpoint, 1983), p. 36.
[iv] F. Lopez-Alves, ‘Political crises, strategic choices, and terrorism: the rise and fall of the Uruguayan Tuparmaros’, Terrorism and Political Violence, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1989), p. 204.
[v] Colin Gray, The Strategy Bridge: Theory for Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 15-53.
[vi] See Michael Howard, War and the Liberal Conscience (London: Hurst, 2008), pp. 5-22.
[vii] Renati Des-Cartes [René Descartes], Meditationes de Prima Philosophia, in qua Dei existentia et animæ immortalitas demonstratur (Paris: 1641).
[viii] “Mao Tse-tung, On Contradiction,” (August 1937), pp. 2-3, Maoist Documentation Project, available at https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_17.htm (accessed 3 May 2021).
[ix] Mao Tse-tung, On Contradiction (August 1937), pp. 2-3, Maoist Documentation Project, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_17.htm (accessed 3 May 2021).
[x] M.L.R. Smith, ‘Politics and Passion: The Neglected Mainspring of War’, Infinity Journal, Vo1. 4, No. 2 (2014), pp. 32-36.
[xi] Carl von Clausewitz, On War (trans. and ed. Michael Howard and Peter Paret) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 80.
[xii] Ibid., p. 87.
[xiii] See for example, Edward Katzenbach and Gene Hanrahan, ‘The revolutionary strategy of Mao Tse-tung’, Political Science Quarterly, 70/3 (1955), pp. 321-340; Francis Miyata and John Nicholsen, ‘Clausewitzian principles of Maoist insurgency’, Small Wars Journal, 24 October 2020, https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/clausewitzian-principles-maoist-insurgency (accessed 3 May 2021).
[xiv] Mao Tse-tung, Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, Vol. II, pp. 224-225, Maoist Documentation Project (2004),
[xv] https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-2/ (accessed 3 May 2021).
[xvi] Mao Tse-tung, ‘Report on the peasant movement in Hunan’, February 1927, Mao’s Road to Power: Revolutionary Writings, 1912-1949, Vol. 2 (New York: Armonk, 1992), p. 434.
[xvii] Mao Tse-tung, ‘Problems of war and strategy’, in Mao’s Road to Power, p. 553.
[xviii] Mao, Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, pp. 224-225.
[xix] Mao Tse-tung, On Practice (New York: International Publishers, 1937), p. 11.
[xx] Ibid., p. 11.
[xxi] Ibid., p. 15.
[xxii] David Apter and Tony Saich, Revolutionary Discourse in Mao’s Republic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), Revolutionary Discourse in Mao’s Republic, p. 35.
[xxiii] Quoted in Peter Collier and David Horrowitz, Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the Sixties (New York: Encounter, 1989), p. 166.
[xxiv] Quoted in Simon Strong, Shining Path: The World’s Deadliest Revolutionary Force (London: HarperCollins, 1992), p. 253.
[xxv] Sandra J. Grey, ‘Activist academics: What future?’ Policy Futures in Education, 11/6 (2013), p. 708.
[xxvi] Helen Pluckrose and James Lyndsay, Cynical Theories (London: Swift, 2020), pp. 61-62.
[xxvii] Ibid., p. 65.
[xxviii] Mao Tse-tung, ‘On the correct handling of contradictions among the people’, People’s Daily, 19 June 1957.
[xxix] Mao Tse-tung, Combat Liberalism, 7 September 1937, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-2/mswv2_03.htm (accessed 12 May 2021).


15. Wary of China threat, Taiwanese join Ukraine’s fight against Russia


Resistance operating concept should be one line of effort.

Excerpts:

Taiwan officials caution that war in the Taiwan Strait, the 100-mile-wide corridor between China and Taiwan, is not imminent. Officials point to differences between Taiwan’s situation and that of Ukraine, including the island’s geostrategic significance and close relationship with the United States. In May, President Biden said the United States would defend Taiwan militarily in the event of an attack by China, before the White House backtracked on his statement, maintaining a long-running policy of strategic ambiguity over the extent of U.S. assistance.
Yet the possibility of an attack by Beijing looms larger as Chinese leader Xi Jinping prepares to take on a third term this year, ushering in a critical period to cement his legacy. With China increasingly at odds with Western countries, and continuing an ambitious military buildup, more observers worry that Xi will take inspiration from his friend and partner, Russian President Vladimir Putin.


Wary of China threat, Taiwanese join Ukraine’s fight against Russia​
By Lily Kuo and Vic Chiang
July 3, 2022 at 8:00 a.m. EDT​
The Washington Post · by Lily Kuo · July 3, 2022
TAIPEI, Taiwan — When Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky called in February for foreign volunteers to help repulse invading Russian forces, Chuang Yu-wei, a Taiwanese tour guide, signed up the next day.
“Taiwan can’t be a giant baby that cries for help but isn’t willing to help others,” said the 51-year-old from Taoyuan, near Taipei. Since arriving in Ukraine in March, he has joined patrols, helped cook, moved supplies and dug trenches near the front lines in Kharkiv. “It doesn’t matter how many of you come, you just have to come,” he said in a phone interview.
For many in Taiwan, the Russian assault on Ukraine hits close to home because of parallels with their own situation. The island’s people live under constant threat from a powerful authoritarian neighbor, China, which claims sovereignty over democratic Taiwan and vows to seize it by force if necessary.
Chuang, who served in Taiwan’s military in the 1990s, is among a small group of Taiwanese volunteers in Ukraine for whom the war is a chance to bring battlefield experience back home — where debate is raging over the island’s military readiness — and show the international community that Taiwan is worth defending.
“I want the world to see that we aren’t the kind of people who lie on the ground waiting to be rescued. If you want people to help you, you first have to help them,” Chuang said.
It’s not known how many Taiwanese are in Ukraine. Volunteer soldiers interviewed by The Washington Post estimate that about 10 of their compatriots have joined the war effort.
Taiwan officials caution that war in the Taiwan Strait, the 100-mile-wide corridor between China and Taiwan, is not imminent. Officials point to differences between Taiwan’s situation and that of Ukraine, including the island’s geostrategic significance and close relationship with the United States. In May, President Biden said the United States would defend Taiwan militarily in the event of an attack by China, before the White House backtracked on his statement, maintaining a long-running policy of strategic ambiguity over the extent of U.S. assistance.
Yet the possibility of an attack by Beijing looms larger as Chinese leader Xi Jinping prepares to take on a third term this year, ushering in a critical period to cement his legacy. With China increasingly at odds with Western countries, and continuing an ambitious military buildup, more observers worry that Xi will take inspiration from his friend and partner, Russian President Vladimir Putin.
For Pan, 26, a volunteer fighter from Hsinchu who previously served in Taiwan’s special forces and the French Foreign Legion, these worries motivated him in April to join the International Legion for Ukraine.
“When the war broke out in Ukraine, I rushed over as soon as I could,” said Pan, who gave only his surname out of security concerns.
He said he has been struck by how the Ukrainian military values soldiers with particular skills. When providing cover for drone pilots doing reconnaissance at the front lines, Pan said, they received orders to protect the pilots at all costs.
“In Taiwan, our electronic warfare specialists are secondary to the traditional army, and [the military] is still promoting the use of bayonets,” he said. Pan hopes to open a boot camp when he returns and bring in some of his comrades from Ukraine to teach Taiwanese civilians how to defend themselves.
Taiwan has lived under military threat from Beijing since Chinese Communist forces defeated the Nationalists in the Chinese civil war in 1949, prompting the Nationalists to flee to Taiwan and set up a rival government. Some Taiwanese islands experienced intermittent shelling by Chinese forces through the 1970s. For most residents, war remains a distant memory and an abstract possibility.
Now, Ukraine’s plight has renewed questions about the possibility of attack and Taiwan’s overall defense strategy, while bolstering calls to review the role civilians would play in a conflict. It has also highlighted concerns about the quality of training in Taiwan’s military, which requires most men to do four months of service.
The government has extended its reservist training program, raised its alert level and said that this year’s main military exercises will be informed by the Ukraine war and focused on asymmetric warfare. Last month, Foreign Minister Joseph Wu said Taiwan was “inspired by Ukraine” to strengthen its defense.
But these steps may not be enough to repel a far more powerful opponent like China. Taiwan’s mandatory military service is often likened to a summer camp, where recruits spend more time doing menial labor than learning combat skills. Tactics taught are comparable to those used during the 1991 Gulf War or the Vietnam War.
“The biggest questions are: What kind of war are we going to fight now? Can our equipment, military units and training match the kind of war we will have to fight?” said Lin Ying-yu, associate professor of Asia-Pacific affairs at Taiwan’s National Sun Yat-sen University.
For soldiers from Taiwan, the Ukraine conflict is a chance to see modern warfare up close. From using artillery in conjunction with drones to employing portable missile systems like Javelins and Stingers, “what they experience on the battlefield will definitely be useful,” Lin said.
Some Taiwanese soldiers in Ukraine say the most important skill is one that’s difficult to learn outside a real conflict.
Chen Ting-wei, 27, who trained with an elite amphibious reconnaissance and patrol unit in Taiwan known as the “frogmen,” was assigned to defend a village near Kharkiv in April.
While he was hiding in a trench with his squad one day, a car came from behind and sped past. One of his teammates, a U.S. Marine veteran, advised that they should leave in case the car was Russian surveillance. Less than a minute later, their area was bombed, killing a member of their team who hadn’t escaped in time.
“The most important experience I’ve gained is agility on the battlefield,” Chen said. “Without the experience, you won’t be able to react quickly.”
Others have been moved by public morale. Lee Cheng-ling, a 34-year-old Uber Eats delivery driver from Taichung who joined Ukraine’s foreign legion in April, said he has been most impressed by the will of the Ukrainian people, something he worries Taiwanese citizens lack.
“They have a really strong sense of unity,” he said of the Ukrainians. “I feel that in Taiwan, our solidarity is more like a show for the international community.”
The volunteers are also spreading word of Taiwan’s precarious position. When Chen tells other foreign soldiers he is from Taiwan, they promise they will come to the island’s aid when needed.
“People from Poland, the U.S., Australia, Brazil and Ukraine have all told me that if China attacks Taiwan, ‘we will meet in Taiwan,’ ” he said.
For Chuang, helping Ukraine is like buying time for his homeland. At Kyiv’s Independence Square recently, he took pictures with the Taiwanese flag at a monument to foreign fighters serving in Ukraine. He believes Taiwan should be the one expressing gratitude.
“If Ukraine had been defeated in two weeks, then Xi Jinping would have attacked Taiwan,” he said.
But, he noted, Kyiv withstood the Russian siege — giving him hope for his homeland.
“We can be more confident in ourselves,” he said.
The Washington Post · by Lily Kuo · July 3, 2022



16. Thinking About the Unthinkable in Ukraine - What Happens If Putin Goes Nuclear?



Excerpts:

In the event of a Russian nuclear detonation, NATO will have two conflicting aims. On the one hand, the alliance will want to negate any strategic benefit Moscow could gain from the detonation; on the other, it will want to avoid further escalation. This dilemma underlines the obvious imperative of maximizing Moscow’s disincentives to go nuclear in the first place.
To that end, NATO should not only pose credible threats of retaliation but also cultivate support from third parties that Putin wants to keep from joining the Western opposition. So far, Moscow has been buoyed by the refusal of China, India, and other countries to fully join the economic sanctions campaign imposed by the West. These fence sitters, however, have a stake in maintaining the nuclear taboo. They might be persuaded to declare that their continued economic collaboration with Russia is contingent on it refraining from the use of nuclear weapons. As a declaration about a still hypothetical eventuality, the neutral countries could see this as a low-cost gesture, a way to keep the West off their backs by addressing a situation they don’t expect to occur.
Washington will always keep declared threats and strategy vague enough to provide flexibility and escape hatches. Still, any further nuclear saber rattling by Putin should prompt simple but forceful reminders from Washington of what Putin knows but might otherwise convince himself the West has forgotten: Russia is utterly vulnerable to nuclear retaliation, and as generations of thinkers and practitioners on both sides have reiterated, a nuclear war has no winner.


Thinking About the Unthinkable in Ukraine
What Happens If Putin Goes Nuclear?
July 4, 2022
Foreign Affairs · by Richard K. Betts · July 4, 2022
As the war in Ukraine rages on, Russian President Vladimir Putin has engaged in nuclear saber rattling. “Whoever tries to impede us, let alone create threats for our country and its people, must know that the Russian response will be immediate and lead to the consequences you have never seen in history,” Putin declared in February in the first of many statements warning of a potential nuclear strike. For the most part, Western observers have dismissed this talk as idle chest-thumping. After all, whichever side fired nuclear weapons first would be taking a very risky gamble: betting that its opponent would not retaliate in an equal or more damaging way. That is why the odds are very low that sane leaders would actually start a process of trading blows that could end in the destruction of their own countries. When it comes to nuclear weapons, however, very low odds are not good enough.
Planning for the potential that Russia would use nuclear weapons is imperative; the danger would be greatest if the war were to turn decisively in Ukraine’s favor. That is the only situation in which the Russians’ incentive to take that awesome risk would be plausible, in an attempt to prevent defeat by shocking Ukraine and its NATO supporters into standing down. The Russians might do this by setting off one or a few tactical nuclear weapons against Ukrainian forces or by triggering a symbolic explosion over an empty area.
There are three general options within which U.S. policymakers would find a variation to respond to a Russian nuclear attack against Ukraine. The United States could opt to rhetorically decry a nuclear detonation but do nothing militarily. It could unleash nuclear weapons of its own. Or it could refrain from a nuclear counterattack but enter the war directly with large-scale conventional airstrikes and the mobilization of ground forces. All those alternatives are bad because no low-risk options exist for coping with the end of the nuclear taboo. A conventional war response is the least bad of the three because it avoids the higher risks of either the weaker or the stronger options.
Competition in Risk
For the past three decades, U.S. policymakers have paid scant attention to the potential dynamics of nuclear escalation. During the Cold War, in contrast, the question was at the center of strategic debate. Back then, it was NATO that relied in principle on the option of deliberate escalation—beginning with the limited use of tactical nuclear weapons—as a way to halt a Soviet invasion. This strategy was controversial, but it was adopted because the West believed its conventional forces to be inferior to the Warsaw Pact’s. Today, with the balance of forces reversed since the Cold War, the current Russian doctrine of “escalate to deescalate” mimics NATO’s Cold War “flexible response” concept.
NATO promoted the policy of flexible response rhetorically, but the idea was always shaky strategically. The actual contingency plans it generated never commanded consensus simply because initiating the use of nuclear weapons risked tit-for-tat exchanges that could culminate in an apocalyptic unlimited war. As J. Michael Legge, a former participant in NATO’s Nuclear Planning Group, noted in a 1983 study for the RAND Corporation, the group could not reach agreement on specific follow-on options beyond an initial symbolic “demonstration shot” for psychological effect, for fear that Moscow could always match them or up the ante. Today, it is hoped that this old dilemma will deter Moscow from unleashing the nuclear genie in the first place.

But NATO policymakers should not bank on Moscow’s restraint. Putin has more at stake in the war than Ukraine’s nuclear-armed supporters outside the country do, and he could bet that in a pinch, Washington would be less willing to play Russian roulette than he is. He could play the madman and apply nuclear shock as an acceptable risk for ending the war on Russian terms.
Levels of Escalation
As NATO confronts the possibility of Russia using nuclear weapons, the first question it needs to answer is whether that eventuality should constitute a real redline for the West. In other words, would a Russian nuclear attack trigger NATO’s shift from merely supplying Ukraine to engaging directly in combat itself? A Russian rationale for tactical nuclear weapons use would be as much to frighten NATO away from crossing that line as to coerce Ukraine into surrender. If a few Russian nuclear weapons do not provoke the United States into direct combat, Moscow will have a green light to use even more such weapons and crush Ukraine quickly.
If the challenge that is now only hypothetical actually arrives, entering a nuclearized war could easily strike Americans as an experiment they do not want to run. For that reason, there is a very real possibility that policymakers would wind up with the weakest option: rant about the unthinkable barbarity of the Russian action and implement whatever unused economic sanctions are still available but do nothing militarily. This would signal that Moscow has complete freedom of action militarily, including the further use of nuclear weapons to wipe out Ukrainian defenses, essentially conceding a Russian victory. As dishonorable as submission sounds to hawks in advance, if the time actually comes, it will have the strong appeal to Americans, because it would avoid the ultimate risk of national suicide.
A nuclearized war could easily strike Americans as an experiment they do not want to run.
That immediate appeal has to be balanced by the longer-term risks that would balloon from setting the epochal precedent that initiating a nuclear attack pays off. If the West is not to back away—or, more important, if it wants to deter Putin from the nuclear gambit in the first place—governments need to indicate as credibly as possible that Russian nuclear use would provoke NATO, not cow it.
If NATO decides it would strike back on Ukraine’s behalf, then more questions arise: whether to also fire nuclear weapons and, if so, how. The most prevalent notion is an eye-for-an-eye nuclear counterattack destroying Russian targets comparable to the ones the original Russian attack had hit. This is the option that occurs intuitively, but it is unattractive because it invites slow-motion exchanges in which neither side gives up and both ultimately end up devastated.
Alternatively, Washington could respond with nuclear strikes on a larger scale than the Russian first use, threatening disproportionate losses to Moscow if it tries further limited nuclear attacks. There are several problems with this heftier option. For one, if used against Russian forces inside Ukraine, U.S. nuclear weapons would inflict collateral damage on its own clients. This is not a new problem. During the Cold War, strategists critical of relying on tactical nuclear weapons to counter invading Soviet forces quipped, “In Germany, the towns are only two kilotons apart.” Using nuclear weapons instead against targets inside Russia would intensify the danger of triggering unlimited war.

A second problem with back-and-forth tactical nuclear shots is that Russia would be at an advantage because it possesses more tactical nuclear weapons than the United States does. That asymmetry would require U.S. policymakers to resort sooner to so-called strategic forces (intercontinental missiles or bombers) to keep the upper hand. That, in turn, would risk unleashing the all-out mutual destruction of the major powers’ homelands. Thus, both the tit-for-tat and the disproportionate retaliatory options pose dauntingly high risks.
A less dangerous option would be to respond to a nuclear attack by launching an air campaign with conventional munitions alone against Russian military targets and mobilizing ground forces for potential deployment into the battle in Ukraine. This would be coupled with two strong public declarations. First, to dampen views of this low-level option as weak, NATO policymakers would emphasize that modern precision technology makes tactical nuclear weapons unnecessary for effectively striking targets that used to be considered vulnerable only to undiscriminating weapons of mass destruction. That would frame Russia’s resort to nuclear strikes as further evidence not only of its barbarism but of its military backwardness. Direct entry into the war at the conventional level would not neutralize panic in the West. But it would mean that Russia would be faced with the prospect of combat against a NATO that was substantially superior in nonnuclear forces, backed by a nuclear retaliatory capability, and less likely to remain restrained if Russia turned its nuclear strikes against U.S. rather than Ukrainian forces. The second important message to emphasize would be that any subsequent Russian nuclear use would trigger American nuclear retaliation.
This conventional option is hardly attractive. Direct war between the major powers that starts at any level risks escalation to mass destruction. Such a strategy would appear weaker than retaliation in kind and would worsen the Russians’ desperation about losing rather than relieve it, thus leaving their original motive for escalation in place along with the possibility that they would double down and use even more nuclear weapons. That would make it imperative to couple the NATO military response with an offer of settlement terms that includes as many cosmetic concessions as possible to give Russia some pretense of peace with honor. The main virtue of the conventional option is simply that it would not be as risky as either the weaker do-nothing or the stronger nuclear options.
The West's Dilemma
In the event of a Russian nuclear detonation, NATO will have two conflicting aims. On the one hand, the alliance will want to negate any strategic benefit Moscow could gain from the detonation; on the other, it will want to avoid further escalation. This dilemma underlines the obvious imperative of maximizing Moscow’s disincentives to go nuclear in the first place.
To that end, NATO should not only pose credible threats of retaliation but also cultivate support from third parties that Putin wants to keep from joining the Western opposition. So far, Moscow has been buoyed by the refusal of China, India, and other countries to fully join the economic sanctions campaign imposed by the West. These fence sitters, however, have a stake in maintaining the nuclear taboo. They might be persuaded to declare that their continued economic collaboration with Russia is contingent on it refraining from the use of nuclear weapons. As a declaration about a still hypothetical eventuality, the neutral countries could see this as a low-cost gesture, a way to keep the West off their backs by addressing a situation they don’t expect to occur.
Washington will always keep declared threats and strategy vague enough to provide flexibility and escape hatches. Still, any further nuclear saber rattling by Putin should prompt simple but forceful reminders from Washington of what Putin knows but might otherwise convince himself the West has forgotten: Russia is utterly vulnerable to nuclear retaliation, and as generations of thinkers and practitioners on both sides have reiterated, a nuclear war has no winner.

Foreign Affairs · by Richard K. Betts · July 4, 2022

​17. In Ukraine, U.S. Veterans Step In Where the Military Will Not


Excerpts:

There are, of course, clear differences between Southeast Asia in 1961 and Eastern Europe today.
The government in South Vietnam at the time was unpopular, wracked by corruption and facing a communist uprising in the countryside. Ukraine’s president enjoys high approval ratings in a country united against the Russian invaders.
But just as in Vietnam, Mr. Beebe said, the United States is now forced to choose between only bad options, trying to support an ally without antagonizing a powerful foe.
Americans on the front lines say that Russia is stoking a broader conflict and that the United States has little choice but to respond.
Both Mr. Milburn and Mr. Blackburn said the United States should respond more aggressively and needed to send more sophisticated, medium-range weapons.
Mr. Blackburn said he understood the caution of the United States but felt it was misplaced because caution would only encourage Russian aggression.
“They are destroying whole cities, killing civilians indiscriminately. If that’s not escalation, what is?” he said. “I don’t see this so much as being like the years before Vietnam. To me, it’s more like the years before World War II. People are going to wonder, looking back, why we didn’t do more sooner.”


In Ukraine, U.S. Veterans Step In Where the Military Will Not
The New York Times · by Dave Philipps · July 4, 2022
Special Operations veterans are training Ukrainians near the front lines in the fight against Russia, despite warnings from the Pentagon.
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Perry Blackburn Jr., who recently returned from Ukraine, organized supplies last month as he prepared for his next trip to the country.Credit...Zack Wittman for The New York Times

By
Published July 3, 2022Updated July 4, 2022, 9:07 a.m. ET
A democracy came under attack. The United States saw a threat to an ally and also to the entire world order, but it feared that sending troops could spark a nuclear war. So, instead, it supplied weapons. And a small number of American Special Operations trainers started quietly working with the local military.
That was the situation in South Vietnam in 1961, a few years before full-blown U.S. military involvement, when the American presence was limited to a military “advisory group.”
It is also the situation in Ukraine today. As a bloody conflict churns on, small teams of American Special Operations veterans are training Ukrainian soldiers near the front lines and, in some cases, helping to plan combat missions.
There is a notable difference, though. In Vietnam, the trainers were active-duty troops under the control of the Pentagon. In Ukraine, where the United States has avoided sending any troops, the trainers are civilian volunteers, supported by online donations and operating entirely on their own.
“This is why I became a Green Beret,” said Perry Blackburn Jr., a retired Army Special Forces lieutenant colonel who spent 34 years in uniform in Iraq, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Egypt, Somalia and Jordan. He is now in Ukraine as a civilian doing what he once did in the military: training local forces to fight a common enemy.
“To not use my talents in a real time of need would be a waste,” said Mr. Blackburn, 60, who was one of a handful of Special Forces soldiers who rode into Afghanistan on horseback at the start of the U.S. invasion in 2001 and is funding similar efforts now through thousands of small online donations from the public.
“At my age, I’ve seen enough death and I want to try to stop the bloodshed,” he said. “We need to give people the means to defend themselves.”
Whether this new type of crowdfunded military support is wise is up for debate. Some experts caution that the presence of American volunteers could lead to some kind of tragic mishap that entangles the United States in a Vietnam-style escalation. Russia says that it would treat volunteer fighters as mercenaries and that they could be executed if captured. The United States discourages Americans from participating in the conflict. It pulled out its 150 military trainers before the war began and now relies on a few dozen commandos from other NATO countries to coordinate the flow of weapons inside Ukraine.
But the volunteers dismiss the idea that they might be stoking a larger war. Instead, they say, they are working to prevent one, by training Ukrainian fighters to put up better resistance against the Russians and deter further aggression.
Mr. Blackburn instructing during training exercises in Ukraine.Credit...Oleg Palchyk
Either way, Americans are in Ukraine. An unknown number are fighting on the front lines. Others volunteer to be members of casualty evacuation teams, bomb disposal specialists, logistics experts and trainers. At least 21 Americans have been wounded in combat since the war started, according to a nonprofit organization that evacuates them. Two have been killed, two have been captured and one is missing in action.
Mr. Blackburn and a small group of volunteers work directly with the Ukrainian military, teaching marksmanship, maneuvering, combat first aid and other basic skills while constantly shifting locations of training camps to avoid Russian rocket attacks.
They say they do all of it without any input from the Pentagon.
“We have no communication with the U.S. military, period,” he said in an interview from his home in Tampa, Fla., where he recently returned to resupply before returning to the war zone. “That’s a line they don’t want to cross. They are not going to take any responsibility for our well-being or our actions.”
Better Understand the Russia-Ukraine War
Then he laughed and added, “In fact, they’d probably do just the opposite.”
Not all volunteers looking to work with the Ukrainian military come with decades of experience. Mr. Blackburn and several other veterans in Ukraine said they had encountered would-be trainers with overinflated résumés and, in some cases, no military experience at all.
In a statement, the Defense Department said it “is not affiliated with any of these groups” and recommends “that U.S. citizens not travel to Ukraine or depart immediately if it is safe to do so.”
Before the war, the U.S. military regularly deployed uniformed trainers to Ukraine. As soon as Russia invaded, the Biden administration pulled out all troops. “We will not fight the third world war in Ukraine,” President Biden said.
The president vowed that the United States would continue to support Ukraine with weapons and has committed $6.8 billion in security aid. American troops are training Ukrainian forces in Poland and Germany. But Mr. Biden drew a clear line in May, saying the U.S. military would not directly fight the Russians.
The attempt to avert direct conflict, though, left a void just as the Ukrainian military’s demand for training skyrocketed. And freelance volunteers are filling it.
A Ukrainian military artillery team prepared to fire an American M777 howitzer.Credit...Ivor Prickett for The New York Times
“We are executing U.S. foreign policy in a way the military can’t,” said Andrew Milburn, a retired Marine Corps Special Operations colonel who leads a group of volunteer veterans who provide training and advice.
Speaking by phone from a village about 15 miles from the front lines in eastern Ukraine, Mr. Milburn said his efforts supported U.S. goals while insulating the United States from involvement. “I’m plausible deniability,” he said. “We can do the work, and the U.S. can say they have nothing to do with us, and that is absolutely true.”
Soon after the war started, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, appealed for international volunteers to join the fight against Russia. The first Americans to answer his call often were amateur adventurers and military misfits looking for action, several volunteers said in interviews.
The group focused on training tends to be older and more experienced. Many climbed the ranks of elite Special Operations units and have done similar work all over the globe.
During 31 years in the Marine Corps, Mr. Milburn held leadership positions in the U.S. military’s Joint Special Operations command, including as the commander of the Marine Raider Regiment. He initially went to Ukraine as a freelance journalist but said he changed course after seeing the Ukrainian military hand assault rifles to inexperienced students, shopkeepers and other citizens before sending them to fight.
“This country has no shortage of trigger pullers. They didn’t need one more,” he said, explaining why he chose not to fight. “But I knew if I could train the trigger pullers, I could have an exponential effect.”
Mr. Milburn connected with about two dozen other Special Operations veterans in Ukraine, and soon they were calling themselves the Mozart Group — a name chosen as a retort to a private Russian military company, the Wagner Group. Through contacts Mr. Milburn and others had built years before with Ukrainian Special Operations troops, the Mozart Group soon set up training camps close to the fighting. Mr. Milburn said it had trained about 2,500 Ukrainian troops.
The group offers basic military instruction for soldiers headed to the front and occasional classes on how to use American weapons, like the shoulder-fired Javelin anti-tank missile.
An American volunteer taught Ukrainian soldiers how to use a Javelin anti-tank missile at a base outside Zaporizhzhia in April.Credit...Lynsey Addario for The New York Times
It also provides some specialized instruction and advice for Ukrainian commandos.
Mozart would be a natural conduit for U.S. military support, he said, but when he tries to contact American military officials in Western Europe, through both official communication and back channels, he receives no response.
“Every time we reach out, we get rebuffed,” he said. “They are so afraid that something bad is going to happen and it will look like it was the purview of the government. We are persona non grata.”
But the United States is wise to be cautious, said George Beebe, a former chief of the C.I.A.’s Russia analysis and the director of the Quincy Institute, a nonpartisan foreign policy research institution.
“Just as in Vietnam, the risk is that we get inadvertently drawn deeper and deeper in, one small step at a time,” he said. “The difference is the stakes are higher in Ukraine. It would be much easier for the United States and Russia to get into a direct conflict that could quickly turn very serious.”
Few ever contemplated that Vietnam could grow into an enormous war, he noted. U.S. involvement started with a group of 300 soldiers in 1955 who trained South Vietnamese soldiers to respond to what some U.S. officials at the time called “a minor civil war.” Slowly, the United States committed more men and more fire power — decisions that, at the time, seemed not just reasonable but necessary, Mr. Beebe said.
Americans began accompanying South Vietnamese platoons on missions, then supporting them with aircraft. As the effort grew, so did the American troop presence. Finally, a 1964 incident in the Gulf of Tonkin drew the United States directly into the war, eventually leaving 58,000 Americans dead without achieving any strategic goals.
“I’m not saying escalation in Ukraine is automatic,” Mr. Beebe said. “But the danger is that we start crossing over red lines before we even know where they are.”
There are, of course, clear differences between Southeast Asia in 1961 and Eastern Europe today.
The government in South Vietnam at the time was unpopular, wracked by corruption and facing a communist uprising in the countryside. Ukraine’s president enjoys high approval ratings in a country united against the Russian invaders.
But just as in Vietnam, Mr. Beebe said, the United States is now forced to choose between only bad options, trying to support an ally without antagonizing a powerful foe.
Americans on the front lines say that Russia is stoking a broader conflict and that the United States has little choice but to respond.
Both Mr. Milburn and Mr. Blackburn said the United States should respond more aggressively and needed to send more sophisticated, medium-range weapons.
Mr. Blackburn said he understood the caution of the United States but felt it was misplaced because caution would only encourage Russian aggression.
“They are destroying whole cities, killing civilians indiscriminately. If that’s not escalation, what is?” he said. “I don’t see this so much as being like the years before Vietnam. To me, it’s more like the years before World War II. People are going to wonder, looking back, why we didn’t do more sooner.”
The New York Times · by Dave Philipps · July 4, 2022



18. Why America’s Far Right and Far Left Have Aligned Against Helping Ukraine

A pox on both extremes and our broken partisan politics.

Excerpts:
To see leftists conceding that Kissinger has a point and Republicans handing it to Chomsky has been quite something. But, the argument goes, if Chomsky and Kissinger (and Mearsheimer) agree, then they must be right. But they’re not. Putin said so himself when he recently compared himself to Peter the Great, claiming Russia’s right to expand into its previous colonies and dropping the pretense that Western provocations had much to do with his decision to invade Ukraine. And there went the strongest argument of both ends of the horseshoe: that this was the West’s fault, driven by the United States. In fact, maybe what explains the horseshoe regarding Ukraine is that it has little to do with Ukraine after all.
For all their disparate political goals and motivations, what unites the far left and far right is their relationship to U.S. politics. What unites them is an opposition to what they perceive as the faults of the status quo, a distrust of the establishment, and crude anti-Americanism.


Why America’s Far Right and Far Left Have Aligned Against Helping Ukraine
The discourse surrounding Russia’s war on Ukraine has created strange bedfellows.
By Jan Dutkiewicz, a policy fellow at the Brooks McCormick Jr. Animal Law and Policy Program at Harvard Law School, and Dominik Stecuła, an assistant professor of political science at Colorado State University.
Foreign Policy · by Jan Dutkiewicz, Dominik Stecuła · July 4, 2022
Since Russia attacked Ukraine, unprovoked, on Feb. 24, the discourse surrounding the war that has emerged in the United States has created strange bedfellows. Although the majority of the American public, led by U.S. President Joe Biden, have thrown their support behind Ukraine, many on the left and right alike have rushed to defend Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime or, at the very least, have urged the United States not to intervene in Ukraine’s defense.
Tucker Carlson, the face of Fox News and host of the most popular show on cable news in the United States, has been spouting pro-Kremlin talking points for months (and is frequently rebroadcasted on Russian state television). Other right-wing figures regularly spew out anti-Ukrainian disinformation and rail against sending heavy weapons to the country.
Meanwhile, the luminary of the American intellectual left, Noam Chomsky, has invoked former U.S. President Donald Trump as a model of level-headed geopolitical statesmanship for his opposition to arming Ukraine. Left-wing sources—such as Jacobin, New Left Review, and Democracy Now!—have hewed to a party line that blames NATO expansion for Russia’s invasion and opposes military aid to Ukraine.
Online, armies of left- and right-wing accounts find fault with Ukraine’s politics, policies, and president. In Congress, seven of the most fervent conservative Trump supporters voted alongside progressive champions Reps. Ilhan Omar and Cori Bush against banning Russian fossil fuels; even more surprisingly, Omar and Bush are joined by so-called squad members Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib as well as the far-right fringe of the Republican Party in opposing the U.S. government seizing Russian oligarchs’ assets.
All of these developments highlight a bizarre alliance between the two ends of the political spectrum. The question is: Why?
What we seem to be seeing is a modern-day version of the horseshoe theory of politics, where the far left and far right find themselves in uncanny alignment. Although historically maligned, the theory seems to hold remarkably well when it comes to U.S. opinion on the Russia-Ukraine war. This doesn’t have much to do with ideological symmetry, however, or even Russia or Ukraine, for that matter. Rather, it has everything to do with the fraught state of U.S. politics, where relying on simple notions of “left” and “right” or “conservative” and “progressive” no longer serves a useful heuristic for understanding political developments.
The horseshoe theory of politics was introduced by French philosopher Jean-Pierre Faye, who believed that the political ideological spectrum—traditionally construed as a linear progression from some form of socialism or democratic collectivism through a bourgeois-liberal center and on to some form of totalitarianism or fascism—was not a straight line between ever-more-distant political positions but rather something like a horseshoe, with the extremes bending almost magnetically into conjunction with each other.
Based on his observation of the alignment of fascist and communist parties in early 1930s German domestic politics and then on the Nazi-Soviet alignment in the international sphere, perhaps best embodied by the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, he believed that the political extremes have much more in common than a traditional interpretation of the political spectrum might suggest.
The idea of the political horseshoe has long been criticized both for its lack of intellectual rigor and for its weaponization by centrists to discredit their opponents, mostly by those on the left who could be compared to the conservatives they ostensibly oppose. Critics of the theory tend to point out that any seeming convergence on political positions between the far left and far right—such as critiques of liberal democracy, globalization, and market-based solutions to social problems—is superficial, masking far deeper and divergent ideological and policy preferences. If anything, what unites the far left and far right, critics assert, is opposition to the liberal center, which is why the liberal center so often uses the horseshoe as a cudgel.
Yet, the theory keeps resurfacing, not least because the far left and far right seem to keep aligning on both ideas and policy.
One reason for this is that the traditional, one-dimensional left-right spectrum does not account for other axes of political division in U.S. politics, such as those dominated not by any traditionally intellectual notions of progressivism or conservatism but instead by negative attitudes toward “the establishment” and broader forms of populism. As one of us has previously noted, populism in the United States is not constrained to the “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) Trump supporters on the right. Instead, it is distributed across the political spectrum, with populists both on the political left (among Sen. Bernie Sanders supporters, for example) and right (among Trump supporters).
What seem to unite the ends of the horseshoe, if we run with Faye’s metaphor, are not high-brow notions of conservatism or progressivism but instead, opposition to elites, party “establishments,” and traditional gatekeepers in the mainstream press. When it comes to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, not only do we see considerable support for the horseshoe theory but also for something that goes beyond it: the idea that the simple left-right paradigm does not get us particularly far in understanding U.S. politics.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine this year, the vast majority of Americans from both parties have supported the U.S. government’s position: They support providing military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine, and surprisingly, there is even considerable bipartisan support for welcoming Ukrainian refugees to the United States. But Russia has found vocal allies too.
The close ideological and financial relationship between many far-right European parties and the Kremlin is hardly a secret, making their support for Putin’s genocidal campaign par for the course. But considerable elements of the American right, including members of the Republican Party, have openly sided with Russia since the invasion.
The GOP has historically wielded its anti-Soviet (pre-1989) and anti-Russian (post-1989) position to great political effect. This is, after all, the party of “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” In 2012, then-GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney called Russia the United States’ primary geopolitical foe and a country that “always stands up for the world’s worst actors.” Fast forward to 2022, and Republicans—including Trump; his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr.; (soon to be former) Rep. Madison Cawthorn; Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance; Fox News personalities, such as Laura Ingraham; and conservative influencers, such as Candace Owens—have all broken from the party line to heap scorn on Ukraine and U.S. efforts to assist it.
A number of tropes that recur in this right-wing critique is the claim that NATO expansion forced Putin’s hand and led to the invasion as well as that money spent on military aid to Ukraine would be better spent on domestic issues, even if those issues include the continued militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border, as suggested by Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley.
Meanwhile, many on the progressive left—including members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and the politicians they support, left-wing academics and essayists, and swaths of self-proclaimed online “anti-imperialists”—have tended to side with the aggressor, Russia (or at least not side with the victim, Ukraine) in one of the clearest examples of colonial aggression in recent memory. Their primary arguments mirror those of the right—NATO expansion and Russia’s legitimate security concerns as a trigger for the war as well as the misuse of funds that could be used to solve domestic problems—but they also express opposition to war full stop and, sometimes, espouse outright support for Russia, all wrapped in language of opposition to U.S. intervention abroad, often construed as “U.S. imperialism.”
There has always been a fringe minority of voices on the far left that have been pejoratively labeled “tankies.” Often self-identified as Marxist-Leninists, they have been apologists for the repressive actions of authoritarian communist governments, such as those of the Soviet Union or China. The insult was originally hurled by fellow leftists at the Western communists who cheered as the Soviet Union rolled tanks into Budapest to repress a popular anti-Soviet uprising in Hungary in 1956. Today, the term is mostly tossed around in online circles, referring to supporters of repressive regimes and applying primarily to the opinions held by fringe journalists working for opaquely funded alternative news sources who praise dictators, such as Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
When it comes to Ukraine, many tankies have embraced a pro-Moscow position and parroted Kremlin talking points, perhaps failing to disambiguate between Russia, an authoritarian capitalist-oligarchic state, and its predecessor, the Soviet Union, an authoritarian communist state. These positions include the false claim that Ukraine’s 2014 Euromaidan protest movement was a U.S.-backed coup, which has been shared directly by elected officials like DSA-backed New York City council member Kristin Richardson Jordan in the form of links to online tankie disinformation. But similar claims have also been made by QAnon-boosting GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and seemingly serious leading scholars, including Chomsky and University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer.
Indeed, what has pulled the ends of the horseshoe together when it comes to Ukraine is not simply opposition to the conflict or cheerleading for Russia but a ready embrace of ideas from across the political spectrum that suits these positions. In other words, contrary to what critics of horseshoe theory claim, we see not only superficial political similarities on Ukraine but a far deeper, if opportunistic, ideological alignment.
Mearsheimer’s work is instructive here. A highly influential scholar of international relations, Mearsheimer is known as one of the leading proponents of the “offensive realism” school of analysis of world affairs. This school argues that states, especially great powers, will act rationally to maximize their military power in an anarchic world system, meaning that they are likely to react violently to perceived threats to their security.
Mearsheimer’s most influential contribution to the debate about Ukraine—other than his musings that U.S. support for the 2014 Euromaidan protests constituted a coup—is that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was directly caused by NATO’s expansion into Russia’s sphere of influence in Eastern Europe and the Baltics, including its overtures to Ukraine. According to offensive realist analysis, Russia’s attack heads off this U.S.-led expansion. Despite the fact that this theory has been widely challenged since the conflict’s first day, Mearsheimer’s explanation has traveled widely.
He has aired his ideas in a guest column for the Economist and in an interview with the New Yorker, and his work has been mentioned by critics of U.S. policy in Ukraine from think tanks such as the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, whose funding sources include both billionaire George Soros’s Open Society Foundations and the Koch Foundation, and the Koch-funded and Sen. Rand Paul-backed Defense Priorities as well as leftist publications, such as the openly socialist Monthly Review, the tweedy Current Affairs, and the trusty social democratic standby the Nation. Mearsheimer has also been retweeted by the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Usually, Mearsheimer’s ideas about Ukraine have been discussed separately from his broader theories about offensive realism because these might prove unappetizing to the very people championing Mearsheimer as the éminence grise on Russian strategic logic. To take a historical example, it’s hard to imagine the United States’ progressive elite championing its attempted invasion of Cuba in 1961 because the country was a Soviet staging ground within the U.S. sphere of influence. But this “red in tooth and claw” realism is exactly what offensive realism implies.
A similar citational fate has befallen both Chomsky, a fierce critic of U.S. foreign policy and brutal international interventionism, and former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the architect of much of that foreign policy and brutal international interventionism. The ends of the horseshoe virtually kiss when these two men’s theories about the end of the conflict in Ukraine overlap. Recently, both men called for the West and Ukraine not to escalate the conflict with Russia and to instead seek “peace.”
And they have both, often in tandem, been used by both the left- and right-wing commentariat to support their claims about Ukraine, including in a recent piece in New York magazine that managed to both claim that the United States does not have the right to intervene in the conflict and has both the power and right to bring Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to the bargaining table.
Of course, there is no reason why people from diverse political leanings shouldn’t draw on the same experts’ political analysis, but the willy-nilly embrace of scholars and statesmen simply because they share one’s predisposition shows a paucity of real political analysis on the far left and far right alike. Both agree on Ukraine, so both draw on the experts (mostly big-name Anglo-Saxon ones and few, if any, Ukrainian ones) that confirm their position.
To see leftists conceding that Kissinger has a point and Republicans handing it to Chomsky has been quite something. But, the argument goes, if Chomsky and Kissinger (and Mearsheimer) agree, then they must be right. But they’re not. Putin said so himself when he recently compared himself to Peter the Great, claiming Russia’s right to expand into its previous colonies and dropping the pretense that Western provocations had much to do with his decision to invade Ukraine. And there went the strongest argument of both ends of the horseshoe: that this was the West’s fault, driven by the United States. In fact, maybe what explains the horseshoe regarding Ukraine is that it has little to do with Ukraine after all.
For all their disparate political goals and motivations, what unites the far left and far right is their relationship to U.S. politics. What unites them is an opposition to what they perceive as the faults of the status quo, a distrust of the establishment, and crude anti-Americanism.
On the political right, the actions of legislators like Greene, Cawthorn, Rep. Paul Gosar, or Rep. Matt Gaetz—all of whom oppose U.S. support for Ukraine against Russia—seem to be driven by a profound dislike of the United States as an ethnically and racially diverse democracy, a country where Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage, is the law of the land (at least, for now).
Many on the far right despise that reality and recognize the ideological proximity of their political goals to what they see as Putin’s accomplishments, including making life extremely difficult for Russia’s LGBTQ community. His general anti-wokeness has been lauded by former Trump advisor and current MAGA influencer Steve Bannon. The Russian propaganda machine has been remarkably well versed in the language of U.S. culture wars, and there is a widespread perception that Putin and Russia are allies to the MAGA wing of the GOP on that culture war front.
The other aspect is the simple fact that in the polarized landscape of U.S. politics, partisanship trumps national interest and lending any support to Biden is simply unacceptable. If Biden and the Democrats take a position (any position), it must simply be wrong and be viciously opposed. That dynamic has been captured by a viral photo from a Trump rally in 2018 that shows two men proudly wearing “I’d rather be a Russian than a Democrat” T-shirts. Unfortunately, as we have highlighted, many MAGA politicians are not just talking the talk; they’re walking the walk on that front.
On the progressive left, the motivation is less any perceived alignment with Putin’s policies and more just plain distrust of U.S. foreign policy. Many Americans in these political circles are very invested in the narrative that the United States is a bad international actor that has caused a lot of pain abroad through various wars (most notably, but not exclusively: Afghanistan, Iraq, and Vietnam). As a result, they reflexively default to the viewpoint that whatever the U.S. policy is toward a foreign conflict, it must be self-interested or even imperialist. This is why many leftists end up repeating the pro-Kremlin framing of NATO expansion as unilateral American imperialism and, even more bizarrely, citing figures like Mearsheimer—and even Kissinger, a traditional enemy of the American left—to support their point.
This framing, of course, misses years of lobbying that countries such as Poland have engaged in to join NATO or the reasons these countries had for pursuing this political course and implicitly deprives these states of any agency in charting their own futures. This is not just cultural chauvinism aimed at the post-Soviet Slavic states that might be explained by a Cold War analytical hangover or plain racism—given that a similar set of arguments is being deployed against Sweden and Finland, which are both on track to join NATO.
If anything, this approach leads (or, one might say, reveals) progressives to be exactly what they profess not to be: U.S.-centered. By treating the United States as the de facto global power, even though it is a great power they oppose, they inadvertently repeat great-power tropes, such as that the United States should (and can) achieve a cease-fire in Ukraine and dictate the terms of that cease-fire to both Russia and Ukraine. This includes the idea that the United States should convince Ukraine to cede territory and the people who live there to Russia.
Reviving a Yalta Conference mindset, but from the left, these ostensible progressives refuse Ukrainians agency, oppose U.S. armed involvement, and yet believe that the United States has the power and right to parcel out Ukrainian land in exchange for peace in Ukraine. In the heart of this perverse leftist anti-imperialism lies the un-imperial impulse to wield imperial power but only, ostensibly, in the name of peace—no matter the will of the locals.
It is not that the U.S. far right and far left share a unified foreign-policy vision, but they do share a vision for Ukraine: naive anti-interventionism. But perhaps rather than simply confirming horseshoe theory, the existence of these strange bedfellows should make us question a simplistic vision of the political spectrum as a unidimensional left-right political space.
After all, there are many on the left—understood as those supporting internationalism, social justice, and redistributive policies—including Sanders, who have thrown their support behind Ukraine for reasons consistent with their broader politics, including opposition to previous U.S. military involvement abroad. So too have many on the right—understood as those who believe in free markets or hold generally conservative sociopolitical positions—supported arming Ukraine, also for reasons consistent with their politics, including a vision of a strong role for the United States in world politics. The center (broadly construed) is also on board—hence the relative consensus on actual policy.
So what accounts for why the ends of the horseshoe are magnetically attracted to each other, pulled away from the rest of the spectrum?
That magnetic force does not come from the political content of the sides of the spectrum. As political scientist Philip Converse demonstrated back in 1964, and as other scholars have subsequently shown, an overwhelming majority of Americans do not hold coherent ideological views. People who do are, in many ways, outliers. The force behind the horseshoe, then, is another dimension of politics without which it is impossible to understand, among other things, why on earth Chomsky and Kissinger would be embraced by people who would never otherwise agree with them both on much of anything. This is the populist, anti-establishment dimension of U.S. politics.
Populism as a term has become something of an empty signifier and, for many, a pejorative. It has been associated with nativist right-wing leaders—such as Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Polish politician Jaroslaw Kaczynski, and Trump—but also with Sanders’s presidential campaign. If anything, in the United States, populism was historically associated with the egalitarian politics of the Populist Party and the subsequent left-wing progressive movement.
But here, what we mean by populism is simply a worldview that pits average citizens, “the people,” against “the elites,” whom populists view as corrupt. This can mean different things for conservative and progressive populists.
On the right, for example, it manifests in “America First” nationalism, isolationism, and the distrust of experts and the news media. On the left, it manifests in the distrust of the traditional party establishment as well as of business interests and mainstream commentators. That is why populists on both sides of the horseshoe generally distrust the traditional mainstream press and its elite talking heads and frequently seek out information from more ostensibly independent and explicitly ideologically aligned sources. It also pushes people inward, toward an isolationism rooted in the belief that when the United States gets involved abroad, it does so in the interests of the country’s political or business elite.
In both cases, it foments a contrarianism that is perhaps most visible on issues where there is a rare national consensus, such as support for Ukraine. In this case, the contrasting motivations of left and right populists lead both sides to reach the same position: one that “both-sides” the war in Ukraine, denies Ukrainians agency, and plays right into Putin’s hands. And this, despite the fact that there is nothing inherent in either far-right or far-left thought that leads to support for Russia or opposition to the plight of Ukrainians.
So perhaps, horseshoe theory as Faye conceptualized it isn’t entirely correct. It is not that the ends of the political spectrum inherently bend toward each other—in other words, that communists and fascists inherently align. If anything, the ends of the political spectrum tend toward broad heterogeneity in opinions. Rather, it is that the populist, anti-establishment impulse on both ends breaks off slivers of adherents who find themselves brought into agreement despite their ideologies.
It doesn’t, of course, help that the traditional, unidimensional political spectrum is itself a flawed heuristic for understanding the totality of people’s political commitments, especially in a country like the United States, where asking for a modicum of welfare state expansion toward an Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development standard marks one as a leftist and denying the results of democratic elections makes one a fairly mainstream right winger.
Yet the prevalence of a certain populism on both the left and right, which shapes debates online and in the media as well as the political messaging and policy priorities of Democratic and Republican politicians alike show that not just the political landscape but the nature of political discourse is deeply fractured. This is not simply a question of polarization but of something deeper: the increasing nonexistence of a shared understanding of political reality. Ukraine, rather than a protagonist in this trend, is just a bellwether of things to come.
Foreign Policy · by Jan Dutkiewicz, Dominik Stecuła · July 4, 2022


19. Ukraine’s moral waters get muddier and bloodier


Can information warfare supremacy (or superiority or dominance) ever be achieved? This calls out some suspected Ukrainian activities.

Conclusion:

The war’s outcome depends on the struggle for time and resources, material and manpower. With Ukraine relying on the West for both weaponry and related training, it must keep winning the information war and keep Western publics and polities emotionally engaged.



Ukraine’s moral waters get muddier and bloodier
Information war supremacy is critical as attritional war stress tests both sides’ will to win


asiatimes.com · by Andrew Salmon · July 4, 2022
As Ukraine and Russia grapple for the moral high ground in the global court of public opinion, Israel has aimed unusually undiplomatic language at Ukraine’s ambassador to Germany.
Last week, in an interview, Kiev’s top envoy in Berlin Andriy Melnyk compared World War II-era Ukrainian nationalist Stepan Bandera to Robin Hood and stated that he “was not a mass murderer of Jews and Poles.”
In Ukraine, Bandera is a hugely divisive figure but the ambassador’s opinion clashes with the mainstream historical narrative – that Bandera’s organization, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, which sided with the Nazis – did exactly that.

“The statements of the Ukrainian ambassador are a distortion of historical facts, a belittling of the Holocaust and an insult to those who were murdered by Bandera and his people,” the Israeli Embassy fumed in comments reported by German media Die Welt.
“The statements not only undermine the values ​​we all cherish and believe in, but also undermine the courageous struggle of the Ukrainian people to live by democratic values ​​and in peace,” it said according to the report.
Melnyk had previously courted controversy by visiting Bandera’s grave, but he is not alone in his admiration. A statue to Bandera stands in Lviv and some Ukrainian troops idolize him so much they bear tattoos of his likeness.
Amid the far mightier sturm und drang of the current war ravaging Ukraine, the verbal brouhaha in Berlin received minimal coverage in English-language media.
This should not surprise. An intra-West divide is becoming apparent over support for Ukraine. The Anglosphere, Eastern Europe and the Baltics have emerged as enthusiastic backers of Ukraine. Core Western Europe – France, Germany and Italy – while supportive, is more restrained.

This presents a challenge for Kiev. Maintaining and increasing Western support is critical – indeed, existential – to Ukraine.
Ukraine Ambassador to Germany Andriy Melnyk’s comments set off a firestorm. Image: Twitter / Ukrinform
Wars are won not simply by killing and destroying but also by breaking the other side’s will to fight. While both Moscow and Kiev must sustain respective national wills, Ukraine has an added vulnerability for it lacks Russia’s vast resources and military-industrial base.
As its stock of Soviet-bloc munitions and weapons runs dry, Kiev is desperately courting Western support for arms and modern munitions. The most visible aid has been seen in equipment for its forces, but training is also at a premium given that the ranks of its professional army are being decimated by pulverizing combat in the Donbas.
The recent fall of the cities of Severodonetsk and Lysychansk means all of Luhansk Oblast has been lost. Yet Kiev had been blessed with some recent good news: Western-delivered long-range, precision weapons have made a strategic, rather than tactical, impact.
The information war being fought in the court of public opinion is also critical. While battlefield combat is fluid, Ukraine has so far been winning the narrative struggle that keeps Western polities on-side.

It is an ongoing struggle: It needs to keep mercurial Western public opinion engaged. In this light, Melnyk’s comments mark a rare misstep by Kiev.
But they are not the only disturbing signals coming from Ukraine, which by most Western media accounts are portrayed as the “good guys.” But actual war crimes, widely documented on Russia’s side, are not just also being committed by Kiev’s forces – they are being filmed and distributed on social media.
Bad deeds, bad reputations
Asia Times has reviewed seemingly credible footage of bound Russian prisoners of war being shot through their legs by Ukrainian soldiers.
Even more disturbing video shows Russian troops lying in a road with long streams of blood running from their slashed throats, being finished off with bursts fired into their twitching bodies while Ukrainian soldiers laugh and congratulate each other.

Asia Times cannot independently confirm the legitimacy of the footage but senior combat veterans who have viewed it are convinced of its authenticity.
The alleged perpetrators of this ISIS-style atrocity have been identified by Russian-language sources as Georgians serving with the Azov Regiment. The unit first appeared as a far-right paramilitary and was subsequently incorporated into Ukraine’s armed forces – where it was declared persona non grata by NATO trainers.
During the Donbas fighting that ignited in 2014, and during the current war, Azov proved to be effective fighters – notably as the backbone of the doomed defense of Mariupol.
The controversies surrounding Azov and a related unit, Kraken, have been noted by Western media but often downplayed. Typically, an article in the US Armed Forces newspaper, Stars and Stripes, references them, but largely admiringly: Kraken is becoming “Ukraine’s most famous band of volunteers.”
Russian footage taken after that the fall of Mariupol shows surrendered members of Azov bearing tattoos featuring Bandera, as well as Nazi symbology.
Even within the unit, there may be an understanding that this will not play well in the West. Likely in consideration of the ammunition it offers Russian propagandists, Azov last month ditched its “Wolfsangel” insignia – a design used by, among other wartime Nazi units, the 2nd SS Panzer Division.
Debate still simmers over what proportion of Azov members are hard rightists. And Asia Times cannot confirm that the videoed throat slitters are Azov members.
But the footage looks entirely legitimate, and has been circulated online in military and veteran circles. A former US officer who served multiple combat tours was appalled.
“As US Army officers, we are indoctrinated to prevent, stop, report and punish any acts of war crime against civilians and enemy combatants,” former US officer David Park told Asia Times. “This is not just a matter of morality and ethics, but serves a practical purpose: Wartime atrocities tend to be reciprocated very fast, and with interest, by both sides.”
However, a recent article on war crimes that appeared on these pages makes the point that “…atrocities, far from being aberrations, are likely outcomes of warfare.”
Indeed, some fighters see an upside to barbarity.
One of Nazi Germany’s most notorious combat officers, Joachim Peiper – Heinrich Himmler’s adjutant and a colonel in the Nazi Germany’s Waffen SS – wrote home, in a letter from the front, “A bad reputation has its uses.”
Peiper himself was implicated in war crimes in Ukraine, Italy and Belgium, while the Waffen SS consistently undertook reprisals against civilian populations as a shock tactic to discourage partisan activity.
More recently, gruesome atrocities have been undertaken, filmed and disseminated by ISIS as it deployed terror as a psychological weapon.
Troublingly for Western citizens, combat zone barbarity is not confined to the SS or Islamic fundamentalist terrorists.
Individuals from units that are at the pinnacle of their respective nations’ militaries – the US Navy SEALs and Australia’s SAS Regiment – have been tried for unlawful killings during the “War on Terror.” While the Azov Regiment is not a per se special operations unit, it enjoys a reputation in Ukraine as a crack formation.
A pre-war march past of Azov troops, displaying their unit banner featuring the “wolfsangel” symbol, Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Scant moral high ground
Holocaust denial by any government official is disturbing. The existence of formed units with neo-Nazi sympathies within any democratic nation’s army is shocking – as are filmed atrocities.
Still, how much moral freight these issues carry compared to the the colossal scale of death and destruction visited upon Ukraine by revanchist Russian invaders fighting a war of choice is questionable.
As of June 26, the United Nations had recorded 4,731 dead civilians and 5,900 injured. That is verified data: the actual numbers, the UN said, are “considerably higher.”
The cost of physical damage to Ukraine is being calculated by Kiev: Relief organizations quote these figures as already being north of US$100 billion. According to the UN, over 5.4 million Ukrainians have registered in Europe as refugees.
A recent commentary by military think tank the Royal United Services Institute points out that what is at stake is more fundamental than what some Western leaders frame as a duel between democracy and authoritarianism: “This is a war instigated by the ‘mighty’ against a neighboring ‘weak’ country…what is fundamentally at stake is how the international community should respond to such an attempt to change the status quo by force.”
And atrocities are not simply on one side: Captured Russian troops in Ukrainian courts have pleaded guilty to war crimes.
These facts and analyses provide data-based grist to Kiev’s information war mill as it formulates and delivers its narrative to the West. Unsurprisingly, these macro cruelties of big war are outweighing the micro cruelties of some Ukrainian troops.
And Ukraine has a star communicator at the national helm. Derided by Russians as a comedy actor, President Volodymr Zelenksy has marshaled his dramatic talents, donned khaki and taken on the role of embattled, passionate defender.
It has been an effective transition. Western leaders and celebrities have flocked to his capital for photo opps; no leader in modern times has been invited to video conference with so many legislatures.
As an information warrior, Zelensky has beaten his opponent bloody. That is remarkable, as President Vladimir Putin has two decades of geopolitical nous under his belt – and is no slouch when it comes to messaging.
Geopolitically, one of his key casus belli – the threat NATO expansion poses to Russia – has been regurgitated by none other than Pope Francis. Public relations-wise, he won tub-thumping populist approval when he was filmed humiliating a corrupt oligarch, while his shirtless machismo has won kudos among those who admire testosterone-driven politicians.
But in the Ukraine War, when it comes to Western public opinion, none of this has availed.
Even when Putin has put forward the case for his emotive “de-Nazification” narrative – stating that while many nations, including Russia, suffer from neo-Nazi groups and individuals, only in Ukraine do such groups hold public parades and incorporate into state armed forces – Putin appears defensive, angry and snarling.
Thoughtful Russians are disturbed at their information war failures. A Russian journalist told this writer during the war’s early phase that Moscow was erring by not putting more effort into promoting its narrative in English.
That may be changing. A recent Sky News report notes that Russia, this weekend, swiftly distributed English-subtitled footage of the capture of Lysychansk.
It matters, for the “soft power” information war directly impacts the “hard power” battlefield in terms of intel, arms supply and training aid.
Massive devastation and loss of civilian life has marked Russia’s war in Ukraine. The macro cruelty of Russian firepower has ouweighted the micro cruelty of alleged Ukrainian war crimes Photo: Sergey Mikhalchuk / Government of Ukraine
Info war to shooting war
In the first phase of the war, Western-supplied arms were critical in Ukraine’s successful defense of its capital – a phase of combat demarcated by Russian operational errors that Ukrainian troops maximally leveraged.
Apparently anticipating a decapitation operation followed by an occupation, Russian vehicles deployed, non-tactically, on tarmac due to the spring thaw, which made off-road maneuver near-impossible. Russian columns were easily ambushed by Ukrainians armed with Western-supplied anti-armor weapons.
That phase of the war is now over. In the ongoing second phase, Moscow is bulldozing through the Donbas – a key terrain objective for Russia. It is simultaneously pursuing Putin’s “demilitarization” aim by decimating Ukraine’s best troops with massed firepower.
Though withdrawal while in contact with the enemy is the riskiest operation in war, and the Ukrainians are in a strategically vulnerable position, they are handling it masterfully.
Russian troops are not only failing to exploit the vulnerability of the Ukrainian frontage – surrounded on three sides – they are being forced to fight in cities where their artillery advantage is partly invalidated.
But unquestionably, Russia is winning the war at present. This is partly because the West has been slow to grant Ukraine the advanced weaponry it needs now.
One reason is practical. Many of the shoulder-fired anti-tank weapons sent in the war’s first months – British NLAWs, US LAWs, German panzerfaust – were small and easy to transport, relatively cheap and easy to use, requiring minimal training.
Artillery systems on the other hand, are huge, hard to transport and expensive, and require specialist troops to operate.
The issue is thus two-fold: How effectively can the West deploy big guns and train Ukraine’s soldiers in their use?
More and better guns combined with the targeting data the West is providing would erode Russia’s firepower advantage. Effective training could switch the manpower advantage from Russia’s professional army to Ukraine’s mobilized mass.
And amid recent bad news for Ukraine, with mounting defeats in the Donbas, there have been recent rays of hope. While Russia uses its gunnery tactically, Ukraine has used recently delivered long-range, precision artillery to strategic effect.
Reportedly, a strike from a long-range, US-delivered HIMARS rocket artillery system destroyed the Russian command post overseeing the critical district of Izium. And a reported combination of drones and French-supplied long-range artillery have made Snake Island untenable, forcing Russian units to abandon it.
As the island off Odessa has been in contention since the war’s earliest hours, the latter development holds major significance. Russia has stated its intention to seize a Black Sea corridor to Transnistria. That would spell disaster for Ukraine, which would lose all sea access.
However, stubborn resistance in the Donbas is closing the Kremlin’s window of opportunity. In autumn, the campaign season ends until the ground again hardens with the Winter frosts.
If Kiev’s forces can reoccupy and weaponize Snake Island with anti-shipping missiles, it is questionable whether Russia’s Black Sea fleet can join the fight for Ukraine’s littoral.
The war’s outcome depends on the struggle for time and resources, material and manpower. With Ukraine relying on the West for both weaponry and related training, it must keep winning the information war and keep Western publics and polities emotionally engaged.
Follow this writer on Twitter @ASalmonSeoul
asiatimes.com · by Andrew Salmon · July 4, 2022

20. Ukrainian Producers Launch Documentary ‘Against All Odds’ About Russian Invasion





Ukrainian Producers Launch Documentary ‘Against All Odds’ About Russian Invasion
deadline.com · by Andreas Wiseman · July 4, 2022
The Organization of Ukrainian Producers (OUP) has teamed up with production company Gingers Media to make a documentary about the first month of the Russian-Ukrainian war.
Against All Odds (working title), which will be directed by Artem Litvinenko (best known for Ukrainian Netflix series The Sniffer), is currently in production and has the support of the Ukrainian Centre for Defence Strategies.
The authors explore how Ukraine managed to thwart the “blitzkrieg” of one of the world’s largest armies and push back the aggressor near Kyiv. According to producers, there will be CGI maps of Ukraine and participants of the battles will speak in their own words.

The film features military experts including General Ben Hodges (a retired commanding general of the United States Army Europe), Admiral Sir Philip Jones (a retired senior Royal Navy officer), and General Andrzej Fałkowski (a former Polish Military Representative at the Military Committees of NATO and the European Union). The film also features Ukrainian military leaders.
Release is planned for fall 2022 with distribution discussions set to begin now.
“Many people have already forgotten the first days of the war, when they considered that Ukraine would surrender in 72 hours. Why were they wrong? How did Ukraine survive? Did leading world experts overestimate the Russian army or underestimate Ukraine? We don’t know the answer to these questions yet, but we eagerly want to find them”, said Igor Storchak, co-founder of the OUP, founder and producer of Gingers Media.
He added: “The war changed everything, it broke millions of lives, destroyed many plans. This film is our contribution to understanding the events happening before our eyes.”
Director Artem Litvinenko commented: “How was this attack repelled? At what cost? All are very important and difficult questions, and the answers are often shocking. How many Russian weapons were destroyed, how large was the destruction and terror against civilians: when you see it with your own eyes you can see a picture of this terrible war”.
The Organization of Ukrainian Producers (OUP) is a group of seven Ukrainian producers. Established in March 2022, the group make documentaries and features about the consequences of Russia’s aggression towards Ukraine. The group is currently working on six documentaries and one fiction film.

deadline.com · by Andreas Wiseman · July 4, 2022





De Oppresso Liber,
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation
Senior Advisor, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy
Editor, Small Wars Journal
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David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
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If you do not read anything else in the 2017 National Security Strategy read this on page 14:

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