Quotes of the Day:

“If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. You can choose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill. I will choose a path that's clear, I will choose free will. 

- Rush

“Never regard your study as a duty, but as the enviable opportunity to learn the liberating beauty of the intellect for your own personal joy and for the profit of the community to which your later work will belong." 

- Albert Einstein

“An arrogant person considers himself perfect. This is the chief harm of arrogance. It interferes with a person's main task in life – becoming a better person.” 

-Leo Tolstoy

1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, August 28, 2023

2. John McCain and the Meaning of Courage By H. R. McMaster

3. Opinion | There’s Only One Way to Control AI: Nationalization

4. President Biden must work with Congress to promote American interests in Asia-Pacific region

5.  Russia Is Poised To Upend the 'Diplomatic Chessboard' in Ukraine by John Bolton

6. Pentagon bets on quick production of autonomous systems to counter China

7. Why Is the Reputation of the U.S. Military Going South So Fast?

8. Fighting to Win: Ukraine, Russia, and the War for Survival

9. Let Ukraine Direct Its Own Counteroffensive by Jack Keane

10. New Friends Changed My Mind About Ukraine

11. Will Politicians Ban Their Best Way of Reaching Young Voters?

12. Russia deploys its best fighting unit to the front lines

13. U.S., Allies Seek Long-Term Military Aid for Ukraine to Show West’s Resolve

14. The World Is Contemplating a Second Trump Administration

15. The White House Must Close Its Hostage Bazaar with Iran and Russia

16. Carrier Strike Groups Should Be Ready to Go Dark in Conflict

17. Three Proposals to Raise the Profile of Irregular Warfare (Book Review)

18. Hamstrung: Sources of and Solutions for Political-Military Mismatch

19. America Is Often a Nation Divided by Karl Rove

20. Why China Could Soon Invade Taiwan

1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, August 28, 2023

Maps/graphics/citations: https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-august-28-2023

Key Takeaways:

• Ukrainian officials formally acknowledged that Ukrainian forces liberated Robotyne amid continued Ukrainian advances in western Zaporizhia Oblast and near Bakhmut.
• The Russian military command continues to expend relatively elite Russian airborne forces by deploying these troops to defend vulnerable positions against Ukrainian counteroffensives.
• A Ukrainian intelligence official indicated that Russian forces may have marginally replenished their stocks of high-precision missiles through conservation in the summer of 2023.
• Ukrainian officials stated that Russian forces may intend to resume a wider campaign against Ukrainian critical infrastructure in the fall of 2023, but assessed Russia likely has not replenished its missile stocks to sustain a campaign on the scale of the winter 2022-2023 strikes.
• Ukrainian officials assessed that any upcoming Russian strike campaign may employ new tactics that use fewer missiles and more drones.
• Russian milbloggers continued to criticize the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) for ignoring ultranationalists’ complaints over the mistreatment of a Southern Military District (SMD) brigade operating in the Kherson direction.
• Russian forces conducted offensive operations on the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line, near Bakhmut, along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line, and in western Donetsk, and did not make any confirmed advances.
• Russian lawmakers and the Russian information space expressed varied opinions about a proposed Russian State Duma bill that would deprive individuals of their acquired Russian citizenship for evading military registration and mobilization.
• The Ukrainian Main Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) reported on August 28 that partisans created an explosion at the barracks of a Chechen “Akhmat-1” Rosgvardia riot police (OMON) unit in Enerhodar in occupied Zaporizhia Oblast.

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, AUGUST 28, 2023

Aug 28, 2023 - Press ISW

Download the PDF

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, August 28, 2023

Riley Bailey, Kateryna Stepanenko, Nicole Wolkov, Christina Harward, and Mason Clark

August 28, 2023, time 7:10pm 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.

Click here to access ISW’s archive of interactive time-lapse maps of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. These maps complement the static control-of-terrain map that ISW produces daily by showing a dynamic frontline. ISW will update this time-lapse map archive monthly.

Note: The data cut-off for this product was 1:30pm ET on August 28. ISW will cover subsequent reports in the August 29 Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment.

Ukrainian officials formally acknowledged that Ukrainian forces had liberated Robotyne amid continued Ukrainian advances in western Zaporizhia Oblast and near Bakhmut. Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar reported on August 28 that Ukrainian forces have liberated Robotyne, achieved unspecified successes southeast of Robotyne (10km south of Orikhiv) and south of Mala Tokmachka (7km southeast of Orikhiv), and are advancing in the directions of Novodanylivka (4km south of Orikhiv), Novopokropivka (15km south of Orikhiv), Mala Tokmachka, and Ocheretuvate (25km southwest of Orikhiv).[1] Heat anomalies from NASA FIRMS/VIIRS sensors and Russian claims of Ukrainian advances likely indicate that Ukrainian forces advanced near Verbove.[2] Malyar also stated that Ukrainian forces pushed Russian forces out of positions east of Klishchiivka (7km southwest of Bakhmut) and in the center of the settlement and have made unspecified progress near Orikhovo-Vasylivka (11km northwest of Bakhmut).[3]

Malyar reported that Ukrainian forces continue offensive operations in the southern direction, which she specified is the main direction of Ukrainian offensive operations.[4] Malyar’s statement is consistent with the scale of Ukrainian offensive operations that ISW has observed in southern and eastern Ukraine. Ukrainian forces are currently conducting two operational efforts in southern Ukraine in western Zaporizhia Oblast and in the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area, and Malyar did not indicate one effort as the main offensive direction.

The Russian military command continues to expend relatively elite Russian airborne forces by deploying these troops to defend vulnerable positions against Ukrainian counteroffensives. Geolocated footage published on August 27 indicates that the Russian military command deployed elements of the Russian 76th Guards Air Assault (VDV) Division to reinforce Russian positions near Robotyne likely from the Kreminna area in Luhansk Oblast.[5] ISW had previously observed that elements of almost all Russian VDV formations are operating in areas where Ukrainian forces are conducting counteroffensive operations, and this lateral redeployment further suggests that Russian forces may be using relatively elite units to reinforce critical sectors of the frontline.[6] Russian forces previously redeployed the 7th Guards Mountain VDV Division from Kherson Oblast to support Russian defenses in eastern and western Zaporizhia Oblast and have transferred other VDV forces from Luhansk Oblast to defend against Ukrainian counteroffensives on Bakhmut’s flanks.[7] The Russian military command has consistently relied on VDV formations as both an offensive and a defensive force and they are likely degraded from their high operational tempo. The degradation of these forces will likely weaken Russia’s ability to sustain complex defensive operations and almost certainly disrupt any Russian intent to resume offensive operations at scale, which have predominantly relied on relatively elite infantry that Russia now lacks.

Russian forces conducted a missile strike on the rear areas of Ukraine on August 28. Ukrainian officials reported that Russian forces launched four Kalibr cruise missiles from the Black Sea and two Kh-59 cruise missiles from the airspace above occupied Kherson Oblast in the direction of Kryvyi Rih on the night of August 28 and that Ukrainian air defenses intercepted all but two Kalibr missiles.[8] The Ukrainian Air Force reported that the Russian missiles struck a civilian industrial facility in Poltava Oblast.[9]

A Ukrainian intelligence official indicated that Russian forces may have marginally replenished their stocks of high-precision missiles through conservation in the summer of 2023. Ukrainian Main Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) Spokesperson Vadym Skibitskyi stated on August 28 that Russian forces have a total of 585 missiles left in their stocks that have a range of more than 500km.[10] Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov last provided official Ukrainian figures on Russian missile stocks in early January 2023 in the closing months of the Russian strike campaign that targeted critical infrastructure from roughly October 2022 to March 2023.[11] Skibitskyi offered new figures for Russian missile stocks, compared with Reznikov’s January 2023 figures as follows:

• 270 Iskander ballistic and cruise missiles (+126 from January)
• 140 sea-based Kalibr cruise missiles (+81 from January)
• Roughly 100 Kh-101/Kh-55/Kh-555 cruise missiles (-18 from January)
• Roughly 75 Kinzhal ballistic missiles (+22 from January)
• 150 Kh-22/32 missiles (-12 from January).[12]     

It is unclear if these figures are estimates or exact amounts, but they nevertheless suggest that Ukrainian intelligence assesses that Russian forces have been able to marginally replenish their stocks of high precision missiles since the end of the larger Russian air campaign in the fall and winter of 2022. Russian forces launched a new air campaign in May 2023 focused on maintaining a more regular pace of strikes against Ukraine with fewer missiles, and Skibitskyi suggested that this allowed Russian forces to replenish their stocks.[13] Ukrainian officials have previously reported that Russia is able to produce roughly a hundred missiles across various types per month, and this has likely allowed Russian forces to either maintain or marginally replenish their stocks during the summer air campaign.[14] Skibitskyi stated that Russian defense enterprises are struggling to produce several dozens of specific types of missiles a month due to foreign component shortages.[15]

Ukrainian officials stated that Russian forces may intend to resume a wider campaign against Ukrainian critical infrastructure in the fall of 2023, but assessed Russia likely has not replenished its missile stocks to sustain a campaign on the scale of the winter 2022-2023 strikes. Skibitskyi stated that Russian forces are conducting reconnaissance on Ukrainian infrastructure facilities and may begin a massive strike series with missiles and drones at the end of September or in October.[16] Russian forces conducted strikes with up to 100 missiles in a single strike series during the air campaign in the fall and winter of 2022, and the marginal replenishment of their missile stocks will likely prevent them from conducting an air campaign at anywhere near that scale.[17] Ukrainian Air Force Spokesperson Colonel Yuriy Ihnat stated that Russia is increasing its missile production but not enough to maintain the same intensity of strikes as the fall and winter of 2022.[18]

Ukrainian officials assessed that any upcoming Russian strike campaign may employ new tactics that use fewer missiles and more drones. Skibitskyi stated that Russian forces are improving their targeting and decision-making speed, are more carefully selecting targets, and are meticulously searching for flight routes that can bypass Ukrainian air defense systems.[19] ISW has previously reported on Russian forces’ ability to innovate and learn over the course of the war.[20] Skibitskyi stated that possible upcoming large-scale Russian strikes may use only about 10 to 30 missiles but will be accompanied by a much larger number of Iranian Shahed-131/136 drones.[21] Skibitskyi and Ihnat stated that a larger number of drones would allow Russian forces to further bypass Ukrainian air defenses, allowing other projectiles to reach their targets.[22] Ihnat stated that drones will likely be used in strikes on Ukrainian energy infrastructure, and Skibitskyi noted that Russian forces have previously used Shahed drones to widely damage Ukrainian electrical substations.[23] Russia has reportedly begun domestically producing modified versions of Shahed-131/136 drones but is reportedly struggling to produce them at the pace and quality it desires.[24] ISW previously assessed that the Russian command may believe that a large number of strike drones will allow Russian forces to overwhelm Ukrainian air defenses, although Shahed drones remain Russia’s high precision weapon system most vulnerable to Ukrainian air defenses.[25]

Ukrainian strikes reportedly damaged Russian aircraft and equipment at an airfield in Kursk Oblast on August 27. RBK-Ukraine cited Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) sources that SBU military counterintelligence conducted a drone strike on an airfield near Kursk City on the night of August 27, damaging four Russian Su-30 fighter aircraft, one MiG-29 fighter aircraft, and radars for a S-300 missile system and two Pantsir missile systems.[26] Kursk Oblast Governor Roman Starovoyt claimed that Ukrainian drones damaged an apartment building, and Russian milbloggers claimed on August 28 that satellite imagery of the airfield showed no visible damage to Russian military equipment.[27] ISW cannot independently confirm the results of the Ukrainian strikes.

Russian milbloggers continued to criticize the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) for ignoring ultranationalists’ complaints over the mistreatment of a Southern Military District (SMD) brigade operating in the Kherson direction. Russian milbloggers continued to claim that the Russian military command chose to ignore and silence reports about elements of the 205th Separate Motorized Rifle Brigade (49th Combined Arms Army, Southern Military District) suffering significant losses with inadequate artillery support and poor leadership in the Kherson direction.[28] One milblogger claimed that the Russian MoD continues to face bureaucratic problems that prevent the Russian military from ingesting criticism and undergoing reforms.[29] The milblogger claimed that Russian ultranationalists were hopeful that the Russian military command would improve its management of the war effort after Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin’s armed rebellion that sought to change Russia’s military command – but such hopes did not materialize.[30] The milblogger claimed that the outrage over the treatment of the 205th Separate Motorized Rifle Brigade divided the Russian information space into milbloggers who are loyal to the Russian MoD and those who oppose the Russian MoD. Another milblogger claimed that he refrains from sharing 90 percent of his information on Russian military failures, noting that Russian officials perceive the limited amount of criticism as a personal attack on them instead of thinking on how to improve conditions for Russian servicemen.[31]

Key Takeaways:

• Ukrainian officials formally acknowledged that Ukrainian forces liberated Robotyne amid continued Ukrainian advances in western Zaporizhia Oblast and near Bakhmut.
• The Russian military command continues to expend relatively elite Russian airborne forces by deploying these troops to defend vulnerable positions against Ukrainian counteroffensives.
• A Ukrainian intelligence official indicated that Russian forces may have marginally replenished their stocks of high-precision missiles through conservation in the summer of 2023.
• Ukrainian officials stated that Russian forces may intend to resume a wider campaign against Ukrainian critical infrastructure in the fall of 2023, but assessed Russia likely has not replenished its missile stocks to sustain a campaign on the scale of the winter 2022-2023 strikes.
• Ukrainian officials assessed that any upcoming Russian strike campaign may employ new tactics that use fewer missiles and more drones.
• Russian milbloggers continued to criticize the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) for ignoring ultranationalists’ complaints over the mistreatment of a Southern Military District (SMD) brigade operating in the Kherson direction.
• Russian forces conducted offensive operations on the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line, near Bakhmut, along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line, and in western Donetsk, and did not make any confirmed advances.
• Russian lawmakers and the Russian information space expressed varied opinions about a proposed Russian State Duma bill that would deprive individuals of their acquired Russian citizenship for evading military registration and mobilization.
• The Ukrainian Main Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) reported on August 28 that partisans created an explosion at the barracks of a Chechen “Akhmat-1” Rosgvardia riot police (OMON) unit in Enerhodar in occupied Zaporizhia Oblast.

We do not report in detail on Russian war crimes because these 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 Ukranian military and the Ukrainian 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.

• Russian Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine (comprised of two subordinate main efforts)
• Russian Subordinate Main Effort #1 – Capture the remainder of Luhansk Oblast and push westward into eastern Kharkiv Oblast and encircle northern Donetsk Oblast
• Russian Subordinate Main Effort #2 – Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast
• Russian Supporting Effort – Southern Axis
• Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts
• Activities in Russian-occupied areas

Russian Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine

Russian Subordinate Main Effort #1 – Luhansk Oblast (Russian objective: Capture the remainder of Luhansk Oblast and push westward into eastern Kharkiv Oblast and northern Donetsk Oblast)

Russian forces attacked Ukrainian positions on the Kupyansk-Svatove line on August 28, and reportedly made limited localized advances on the frontline. A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces seized two Ukrainian positions in the Synkivka-Petropavlivka area (9km northeast and 6km east of Kupyansk, respectively).[32] A Russian news aggregator claimed that Russian forces are continuing to clear positions near Synkivka and Petropavlivka, and are advancing in the Kupyansk direction.[33] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) similarly claimed that elements of the Russian Western Grouping of Forces seized an unspecified Ukrainian position in the Kupyansk direction.[34] A Kremlin-affiliated milblogger claimed that Russian forces are exerting pressure on Ukrainian forces near Synkivka and Petropavlivka, but observed that Russian forces are unlikely to break through Ukrainian defenses in the near term.[35] The milblogger added that swampy terrain and continuous minefields in the Kupyansk direction create serious problems for Russian advances in this area.[36] Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar reported that Russian forces are mining positions along Belgorod Oblast’s border with Ukraine and are continuing to look for weak spots in Ukrainian defenses.[37] Ukrainian Eastern Group of Forces Spokesperson Ilya Yevlash stated that 45,000 Russian personnel are currently operating in the Kupyansk direction.[38]

Russian forces continued to concentrate their offensive efforts on the Svatove-Kreminna line on August 28 but did not make any advances. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled a Russian attack on Novoyehorivka (15km southwest of Svatove).[39] Malyar noted that Russian forces are continuing unsuccessful offensive operations southwest of Kreminna, near Bilohorivka (13km south of Kremina), in the Serebryanske forest area (south of Kreminna), and near Vesele (31km southwest of Kreminna).[40] Russian sources also claimed that Russian forces attacked near Bilohorivka, Novoyehorivka, and the Serebryanske forest area – with one Kremlin-affiliated milblogger specifying that Russian forces did not advance near Novoyehorivka.[41] The Kremlin-affiliated milblogger claimed that Russian forces are attacking Novoyehorivka and Bilohorivka to sever Ukrainian ground lines of communication (GLOCs) in Borova (35km west of Svatove) and Siversk (18km southwest of Kreminna), respectively.[42] Malyar stated that Russian forces are preparing to regroup forces in the Lyman direction (west of Kreminna) and are trying to use the most professional Russian Airborne (VDV) Assault units on the Luhansk Oblast frontline in order to draw Ukrainian forces from the Bakhmut direction.[43] Yevlash stated that 48,000 Russian personnel are currently operating in the Lyman direction, and Russian milbloggers reiterated Yevlash’s report noting that there are 110,000 Russian troops along the entire Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna frontline.[44] A Kremlin-affiliated milblogger also indicated that elements of the BARS-12 (Russian Combat Reserve) unit are operating south of Kreminna in the Siversk salient.[45]

Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces continued counterattacks on the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line on August 28, but did not regain new territory. The Russian MoD claimed that Russian forces repelled Ukrainian attacks near Synkivka, Novoselivske (15km northwest of Svatove), and Kuzmyne (less than 3km southwest of Kreminna).[46]

Russian Subordinate Main Effort #2 – Donetsk Oblast (Russian objective: Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast, the claimed territory of Russia’s proxies in Donbas)

Ukrainian forces conducted offensive operations near Bakhmut and advanced on August 28. Malyar reported that Ukrainian forces pushed Russian forces out of positions east of Klishchiivka (7km southwest of Bakhmut) and in the center of the settlement and are continuing to advance along Bakhmut’s southern flank.[47] Malyar also reported that Ukrainian forces are making unspecified progress near Orikhovo-Vasylivka (11km northwest of Bakhmut).[48] Malyar reported that Ukrainian forces have liberated a total of 44 square kilometers in the Bakhmut direction, including 1 square kilometer in the last week.[49] Russian sources, including the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD), claimed that Ukrainian forces unsuccessfully attacked near Klishchiivka.[50] A Russian milblogger claimed on August 27 that Ukrainian forces unsuccessfully attacked near Kurdyumivka (13km southwest of Bakhmut), Andriivka (10km southwest of Bakhmut), and Klishchiivka.[51]

Russian forces conducted offensive operations near Bakhmut on August 28 and reportedly advanced. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful offensive operations near Klishchiivka.[52] Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar reported that Russian forces unsuccessfully attempted to restore lost positions near Orikhovo-Vasylivka and Klishchiivka.[53] A Russian milblogger claimed on August 27 that Russian forces made unspecified gains near Berkhivka (6km northwest of Bakhmut) over the past week.[54] Russian sources claimed on August 27 and 28 that Russian forces counterattacked near Klishchiivka and conducted offensive operations near Orikhovo-Vasylivka.[55] A Russian source claimed that Russian forces attacked near Dubovo-Vasylivka (6km northwest of Bakhmut) and Ivanivske (6km west of Bakhmut).[56] Ukrainian Eastern Group of Forces Spokesperson Ilya Yevlash reported that Russian forces are trying to restore lost positions in the Bakhmut direction, especially on the southern flank.[57] Yevlash stated that Russian forces are committing reserves without proper training to the Bakhmut area.[58] Yevlash added that Russian forces first commit convict personnel from various unspecified private military companies (PMCs) to conduct assaults without artillery support or heavy equipment, followed by better trained personnel with protection.[59]

The Russian MoD claimed that Ukrainian forces unsuccessfully attacked along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line near Krasnohorivka (either 8km northwest of Avdiivka or directly west of Donetsk City).[60]

Russian forces conducted offensive operations along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line but did not make any claimed or confirmed gains on August 28. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces unsuccessfully attacked near Marinka (directly west of Donetsk City).[61] Malyar reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful offensive operations near Stepove (8km northwest of Avdiivka), Avdiivka, Marinka, and Novomykhailivka (10km southwest of Donetsk City).[62] Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces attacked in Marinka and near Stepove.[63] A Russian milblogger claimed on August 27 that Russian forces are periodically attacking near Novomykhailivka and Avdiivka, but not nearly as intensely as a few months ago.[64]

Russian Supporting Effort – Southern Axis (Russian objective: Maintain frontline positions and secure rear areas against Ukrainian strikes)

Geolocated footage published on August 27 indicates that Ukrainian forces recently made marginal gains north of Shevchenko (40km southwest of Donetsk City) in western Donetsk Oblast.[65]

Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar reported on August 28 that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful offensive operations near Vuhledar (30km southwest of Donetsk City) in western Donetsk Oblast.[66]

Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces continued limited unsuccessful offensive operations along the administrative border between Donetsk and Zaporizhia oblasts on August 28. The Russian MoD claimed that elements of the Russian Eastern Grouping of Forces repelled two Ukrainian assaults near Staromayorske (9km south of Velyka Novosilka).[67] Russian milbloggers claimed that the tempo of Ukrainian offensive operations in the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area continues to decline.[68] A Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces unsuccessfully attempted to advance towards Pryyutne (15km southwest of Velyka Novosilka), Staromlynivka (14km south of Velyka Novosilka), and Kermenchyk (15km southeast of Velyka Novosilka) in the past week.[69] The milblogger expressed concern about the possibility of Ukrainian forces capturing positions near Kermenchyk, which he claimed serve an important role in the Russian defensive layer in the area.[70] Russian forces amplified footage showing elements of the Russian 394th Motorized Rifle Regiment (127th Motorized Rifle Division, 5th Combined Arms Army, Eastern Military District) operating southwest of Velyka Novosilka.[71]

Malyar announced on August 28 that Ukrainian forces have liberated Robotyne (10km south of Orikhiv) in western Zaporizhia Oblast.[72] Malyar stated that Ukrainian forces had liberated the settlement as a matter of fact during a television broadcast and not as a formal announcement, which Ukrainian officials have typically issued for previously liberated settlements.[73] Ukrainian officials may have meant for a video of Ukrainian forces raising a flag in Robotyne on August 23 to act as an announcement of the settlement’s liberation.[74] Russian sources denied Malyar’s announcement and continue to claim that Russian forces maintain positions on the southern outskirts of Robotyne.[75] Russian milbloggers claimed that fighting continues in Robotyne itself and in the surrounding areas.[76]

Ukrainian forces continued offensive operations in western Zaporizhia Oblast on August 28 and likely made further advances. Malyar reported that Ukrainian forces achieved unspecified success in the direction southeast of Robotyne and south of Mala Tokmachka (7km southeast of Orikhiv) and are advancing in the direction of Novodanylivka (4km south of Orikhiv), Novopokropivka (15km south of Orikhiv), Mala Tokmachka, and Ocheretuvate (25km southwest of Orikhiv).[77] Russian milbloggers claimed that Ukrainian forces advanced in the direction of Verbove (18km southwest of Orikhiv), with one milblogger claiming that the frontline is less than four kilometers away from the settlement in an unspecified area west of Verbove.[78] NASA’s FIRMS/VIIRs sensors show a large number of heat anomalies next to a segment of Russian anti-tank trenches to the west of Verbove on August 27, suggesting that Ukrainian forces may be attempting to breach the Russian defensive positions there.[79] The heat anomalies and Russian reports of Ukrainian advances likely indicate that Russian forces do not control territory west of this segment of anti-tank ditches. A Russian milblogger expressed concern about the vulnerability of Russian positions along the Robotyne-Verbove line in the event of further Ukrainian advances through Russian defensive positions near Verbove.[80] A prominent Russian milblogger claimed that reports of Ukrainian breakthroughs closer to Novoprokopivka are false.[81]

The Russian MoD and Crimean occupation head Sergei Aksyonov claimed on August 28 that Russian air defense shot down two Ukrainian drones over Crimea.[82] The Russian MoD and other Russian sources also claimed that Russian air defense shot down a Ukrainian cruise missile off the coast of Crimea.[83]

Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts (Russian objective: Expand combat power without conducting general mobilization)

Russian lawmakers and the Russian information space expressed varied opinions about a proposed Russian State Duma bill that would deprive individuals of their acquired Russian citizenship for evading military registration and mobilization. State Duma Deputy Mikhail Matveev announced on August 28 that he submitted the bill, and Russian opposition outlet Verstka observed that none of Matveev’s individually authored bills have ever reached a second reading.[84] An unnamed source in the State Duma told Verstka that neither the State Duma leadership nor the Russian Federation Council supported the bill. A source in the Federation Council called revoking acquired citizenship a “too serious threat” to Russian citizens with acquired citizenship because it could deter people from wanting Russian citizenship and because citizenship is “sacred.”[85] A prominent Russian milblogger claimed that stricter administrative measures would not solve all the problems of migration to Russia and advocated for migrants to join construction formations to build barracks and training grounds, lay roads, and construct dragon‘s teeth fortifications.[86] The milblogger claimed that the Russian military is already ineffective in properly integrating convicts into its combat elements and that adding migrants into Russian armed formations would further complicate unit cohesion.[87]

A Russian BARS (Russian Combat Reserve) political officer stated that BARS units lack specialists and young personnel. A political officer for the BARS-13 detachment claimed in an interview published on August 26 that the average age of BARS personnel is 45 years old and that about 30 percent of BARS personnel do not have any prior military experience.[88]

Military registration and enlistment offices are unlikely to complete the previously announced intended digitization of military registers by the next conscription cycle in October. Verstka reported that many military registration and enlistment offices continue to use paper documents and have not yet configured new computers or installed new software on existing computers to facilitate the digitalization process.[89]

Activities in Russian-occupied areas (Russian objective: Consolidate administrative control of annexed areas; forcibly integrate Ukrainian citizens into Russian sociocultural, economic, military, and governance systems)

The Ukrainian Main Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) reported on August 28 that Ukrainian partisans caused an explosion at the barracks of a Chechen “Akhmat-1” Rosgvardia riot police (OMON) unit in Enerhodar, occupied Zaporizhia Oblast.[90] The GUR reported that the explosion injured Rosgvardia personnel and damaged vehicles.[91] Russian sources claimed that a Ukrainian drone struck a building of the Enerhodar civil-military occupation administration.[92]

Russian occupation authorities are likely attempting to boost voter turnout in the September regional elections by allowing residents of Russian-occupied Zaporizhia, Kherson, Donetsk, and Luhansk oblasts to vote at polling stations in occupied Crimea. The Kherson Oblast occupation administration announced on August 28 the establishment of 15 extraterritorial polling stations in occupied Crimea.[93]

Significant activity in Belarus (Russian efforts to increase its military presence in Belarus and further integrate Belarus into Russian-favorable frameworks and Wagner Group activity in Belarus)

The United Kingdom Ministry of Defense (UK MoD) reported that Russia has likely canceled the “Zapad-2023” joint strategic exercise scheduled for September.[94] The UK MoD stated that Russia likely canceled the exercise because the Russian military lacks equipment and troops due to their use in the war in Ukraine and because the Kremlin is concerned about domestic criticism of military exercises during wartime.[95] Russia may still conduct exercises under the “Zapad-2023” title but at a much smaller scale. Ukrainian intelligence previously reported in winter 2023 that Russia and Belarus were planning to conduct major joint strategic exercises Zapad-2023 and Union Shield-2023 with Belarusian forces and that Russia would deploy personnel to Belarus for these exercises.[96]

ISW will continue to report daily observed Russian and Belarusian military activity in Belarus as part of ongoing Kremlin efforts to increase their control over Belarus and other Russian actions in Belarus.

Note: ISW does not receive any classified material from any source, uses only publicly available information, and draws extensively on Russian, Ukrainian, and Western reporting and social media as well as commercially available satellite imagery and other geospatial data as the basis for these reports. References to all sources used are provided in the endnotes of each update.

2. John McCain and the Meaning of Courage By H. R. McMaster

There is only one real litmus test for all of us: Do we support and defend the Constitution or do we only pay lip service to it?

Conclusion:

Although McCain’s memory evokes words such as courage, empathy, pride, and determination, it will be up to the senator’s fellow citizens and like-minded friends abroad to translate those words into actions that secure his legacy. Will we find the courage to confront those who perpetuate ignorance and foment hatred and deploy it to justify violence against the innocent? Will we exhibit the empathy necessary to understand each other, build partnerships, and, when we disagree, do so respectfully? Will Americans rekindle pride in who they are, one nation committed to the principles of liberty, individual rights, and the rule of law? Will the United States possess the determination not only to defend its way of life but also to strengthen its democratic institutions and promote freedom and prosperity at home and abroad? Although McCain is no longer here to help us answer these questions, we must draw inspiration from his memory—and honor it with deeds that secure the legacy of an American hero.

John McCain and the Meaning of Courage

Honoring His Political and Military Legacy Is Vital

By H. R. McMaster

August 29, 2018

Foreign Affairs · by H. R. McMaster · August 29, 2018

Carl von Clausewitz, the Prussian philosopher of war, wrote in the early nineteenth century that “courage is of two kinds: first, physical courage, or courage in the presence of danger; and next, moral courage, or courage before responsibility.” The late U.S. Senator John McCain demonstrated both. His physical courage was apparent during the 23 combat missions he flew over North Vietnam, especially the last of these, when he was shot down over Hanoi, severely wounded, and captured by the North Vietnamese. During his captivity over the next five and a half years, more than two of which he spent in solitary confinement, he demonstrated not only physical but also moral courage while enduring the worst possible forms of torture. Perhaps his most courageous act as a prisoner of war came when he refused to accept early release, in order to remain with his fellow Americans and deny the North Vietnamese a propaganda victory.

Years later, McCain would continue to demonstrate moral courage. He often broke with his party and never adapted his political positions to the latest opinion polls. He refused to attack the character of his political opponents, even as political competitions across the country reached new depths of incivility.

McCain’s unwillingness to callously disparage his rivals was rooted in his empathy for his fellow man. At a time when American public discourse was becoming increasingly insular, he sought to foster relationships with like-minded nations and understand conflicts abroad that affected U.S. security and national interests. His fast-paced overseas trips, always with bipartisan groups of colleagues from the U.S. Senate and House, were legion. During my many meetings with him and his dear friends Senator Lindsey Graham and Senator Joseph Lieberman, McCain always tried to understand the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq from the perspective of the Afghan and Iraqi people. Empathy lay at the root of his humaneness, including his opposition to any form of torture.

Psychologists tell us that empathy and humor are linked. The senator’s quick wit, usually delivered in the form of self-deprecating jokes or well-meaning barbs aimed at allies and opponents alike, were the foundations on which he built friendships across the aisle and internationally. These qualities, combined with his boundless energy, allowed him to generate bipartisan support for otherwise contentious proposals, from campaign finance reform to defense appropriations to immigration reform.

Perhaps McCain’s most dramatic act of empathy was his push to normalize relations between the United States and Vietnam. In 1994, he co-sponsored a bill with then Senator John Kerry that called for an end to economic sanctions against Vietnam. McCain went on to visit the country over 20 times. This week, his former tormentors praised and thanked him. Retired Vietnamese Colonel Tran Trong Duyet, who, as commandant of the place that American prisoners of war called the Hanoi Hilton, oversaw the systematic torture and deprivation of McCain and his fellow servicemen, recalled McCain’s “toughness and strong stance.”

That toughness and strong stance derived, in part, from McCain’s pride in his nation and his sense of honor as a naval officer in its service. He wrote in his farewell letter:

I lived and died a proud American. We are citizens of the world’s greatest republic, a nation of ideals, not blood and soil. We are blessed and are a blessing to humanity when we uphold and advance those ideals at home and in the world. We have helped liberate more people from tyranny and poverty than ever before in history. We have acquired great wealth and power in the process.

McCain’s pride in what the United States stands for in the world drove his efforts as a senator for over 30 years to free people from oppression and promote representative government based on individual rights, liberty, and the rule of law. It also made him determined to ensure that the United States succeeded in the great competitions of his era. In his oversight role on the Senate Armed Services Committee, he advocated for a strong, ready military as the best guarantor of peace. Even when it had become unfashionable to do so, he called for strategies in Afghanistan and Iraq that would allow the United States to win those wars and secure its vital interests. In 2006 and 2007, when many were calling for a withdrawal from Iraq, McCain pressed for a renewed military effort and a new plan of action to ensure the enduring defeat of international terrorist organizations and deny Iran the ability to extend its malign influence across the region. His push for victory had a moral dimension: McCain believed that sending American troops into harm’s way is justified only if those troops are enabled to achieve outcomes worth the risks they run and the sacrifices they make.

McCain was equally strong in his determination to combat Russian President Vladimir Putin’s campaign of propaganda, disinformation, and political subversion against the United States and Europe. He was zealous in his defense of democracy and his condemnation of autocracy. His passion sometimes gave rise to his famous temper. But that temper was always directed at those who threatened what he held so dear—the freedom, liberty, and humaneness denied him for over half a decade in a prisoner-of-war camp.

Although McCain’s memory evokes words such as courage, empathy, pride, and determination, it will be up to the senator’s fellow citizens and like-minded friends abroad to translate those words into actions that secure his legacy. Will we find the courage to confront those who perpetuate ignorance and foment hatred and deploy it to justify violence against the innocent? Will we exhibit the empathy necessary to understand each other, build partnerships, and, when we disagree, do so respectfully? Will Americans rekindle pride in who they are, one nation committed to the principles of liberty, individual rights, and the rule of law? Will the United States possess the determination not only to defend its way of life but also to strengthen its democratic institutions and promote freedom and prosperity at home and abroad? Although McCain is no longer here to help us answer these questions, we must draw inspiration from his memory—and honor it with deeds that secure the legacy of an American hero.

• H. R. McMASTER is a former U.S. National Security Adviser and the Fouad and Michelle Ajami Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.

Foreign Affairs · by H. R. McMaster · August 29, 2018

3. Opinion | There’s Only One Way to Control AI: Nationalization

Is nationalization the only way?  

A fascinating read.

Excerpt (and is this the real problem/challenge?):

The next morning I phoned the AI engineer who’d written NeuralEye’s algorithm while at the Jet Propulsion Lab, home of the Mars Rover program. I asked him how NeuralEye could have seen a connection between Zachie and his father. He waxed philosophical for a few minutes, and then, when pressed, admitted he had no clue.

That’s the thing about AI: Not even the engineers who build this stuff know exactly how it works.

Opinion | There’s Only One Way to Control AI: Nationalization

Politico

AI’s infinite potential — and infinite risk — requires federal ownership.

POLITICO illustration/Photos by iStock

Opinion by Charles Jennings

08/20/2023 07:00 AM EDT

Charles Jennings is the former CEO of an AI company partnered with CalTech/JPL. His 2019 book, Artificial Intelligence: Rise of the Lightspeed Learners (Rowman &Littlefield), was reissued this year in a paperback edition.

Nine years ago, in a commercial AI lab affiliated with Caltech, I witnessed something extraordinary.

My colleague Andrej Szenasy was wrapping up a long day’s work training NeuralEye, an AI initially developed for the Mars Rover program, and I was a few cubicles away, plowing through NeuralEye’s test data. “Hey, check this out!” he shouted.

Our lab’s mission was to train NeuralEye to see as humans do, with the ability to recognize things, not just record them as a camera does. NeuralEye was built originally to discern different soil types on Mars, but we were teaching it to identify Earth’s inhabitants: animals, plants and individual humans. We believed AI could greatly improve face recognition, so that it could be used in cybersecurity, replacing passwords.

The first step in teaching NeuralEye to identify people was to get it to match various photos of a single person’s face. Typically, one photo would reside in NeuralEye’s training dataset of 14,000 faces; another — a different photo of the same person — would serve as the “prompt.” When NeuralEye successfully matched these two photos out of the thousands in its dataset, it got the digital equivalent of a doggie treat. In AI, this method is known as reinforcement learning, and with NeuralEye, it was working.

That night in the lab, for fun, Szenasy had prompted NeuralEye with a photo of his son, Zachie. Szenasy’s face was in NeuralEye’s dataset; Zachie’s wasn’t. Zachie, who has Down Syndrome, was a sweet 8-year-old. Round face, thick glasses, mop of black hair. Dad was tall and thin, no glasses, blonde with a receding hairline. If there was a physical resemblance between them, I couldn’t see it.

Szenasy sat me in front of his computer and again prompted NeuralEye with a photo of Zachie’s face. NeuralEye spun through its cache of stored faces looking for Zachie —and up popped a photo of Szenasy. Without any specific instruction, NeuralEye had somehow picked up a faint family resemblance. Out of those 14,000 faces, it selected Szenasy’s face as the third closest match with Zachie’s.

The next morning I phoned the AI engineer who’d written NeuralEye’s algorithm while at the Jet Propulsion Lab, home of the Mars Rover program. I asked him how NeuralEye could have seen a connection between Zachie and his father. He waxed philosophical for a few minutes, and then, when pressed, admitted he had no clue.

That’s the thing about AI: Not even the engineers who build this stuff know exactly how it works.

This Zachie episode took place in 2014, a time in AI that now seems prehistoric. Training datasets then had records in the thousands, not hundreds of millions, and large language models like GPT were just a gleam in Sam Altman’s eye. Today, AIs are writing novels, passing the bar exam, piloting warfighter drones. According to a recent University of Texas study widely reported on cable news, an AI in Austin is effectively reading minds: After an in-depth CAT-scan and 16 hours of one-on-one training with someone, it can read neural brain patterns and suggest what the subject is thinking with surprising accuracy. But in those halcyon AI days nearly a decade ago, we in our small lab were amazed that NeuralEye could do something as basic as spot a link between Szenasy and his son.

While the best AI scientists obviously know a great deal about AI, certain aspects of today’s thinking machines are beyond anyone’s understanding. Scientists cleverly invented the term “black box” to describe the core of an AI’s brain, to avoid having to explain what’s going on inside it. There’s an element of uncertainty — even unknowability — in AI’s most powerful applications. This uncertainty grows as AIs get faster, smarter and more interconnected.

The AI threat is not Hollywood-style killer robots; it’s AIs so fast, smart and efficient that their behavior becomes dangerously unpredictable. As I used to tell potential tech investors, “The one thing we know for certain about AIs is that they will surprise us.”

When an AI pulls a rabbit out of its hat unexpectedly, as NeuralEye did on a small scale with Zachie, it raises the specter of runaway AI — the notion that AI will move beyond human control. Runaway AIs could cause sudden changes in power generation, food and water supply, world financial markets, public health and geopolitics. There is no end to the damage AIs could do if they were to leap ahead of us and start making their own arbitrary decisions — perhaps with nudges from bad actors trying to use AI against us.

Yet AI risk is only half the story. My years of work in AI have convinced me a huge AI dividend awaits if we can somehow muster the political will to align AI with humanity’s best interests.

With so much at stake, it’s time we in the United States got serious about AI policy. We need garden variety federal regulation, sure, but also new models of AI leadership and governance. And we need to consider an idea that would have been unthinkable a year ago.

We need to nationalize key parts of AI.

As anyone who’s worked with them knows, AIs make stupid mistakes. They lack common sense, come up with weird “hallucinations” (false, random claims) and are prone to “overlearning” — seeing everything as a nail because they were trained as a hammer.

But AIs also see patterns we don’t. They draw inferences from Himalayan mountains of data while our brains crawl around in molehills. Generative AI (notably ChatGPT) is all the rage, but if you want to better understand how AI evolves — and appreciate the rise of AI beneath all the current hype — check out the past decade in AI vision.

Since 2014, image-recognition rates have climbed faster than AI stock prices. When a computer identifies your face, it’s AI. When self-driving cars navigate roadways, they “see” with AI. AIs now read x-rays with greater precision than a radiologist and spot cancer growths no human doctor can detect: In one clinical trial, AI helped detect 20 percent more cases of breast cancer than flesh-and-blood radiologists. If you had told me in 2014 that AI vision would be doing such things within a decade, I’d have suggested you stop watching so much Spielberg.

AI of all kinds is now advancing on a trajectory similar to AI vision. From agriculture to education, medicine to transportation, entertainment to finance — AI is penetrating every nook and cranny of American life. We live in the era of mass AI electrification, except this time the electricity itself keeps evolving.

There is much about AI we don’t know, but AI experts do agree on one thing: The pace of AI’s disruption of society will never be this slow again. Unfortunately, one branch of AI is lagging: the field known as AI safety.

AI safety addresses a wide variety of potential AI risks: accidents, questions of ethics, cybersecurity, military security, misinformation, election disruption and more. Despite the efforts of a growing number of prominent researchers and considerable investment by AI companies, AI safety proceeds far more slowly than AI itself. It’s a rowboat chasing a jet ski.

If there is one thing that everyone should know about AIs, it’s this: They move fast. Microsoft’s ChatGPT app signed up 100+ million users in about 20 minutes. AIs run on a stack of hardware and software resources whose processing speed is constantly accelerating. The datasets used to train AIs are growing and improving. As a result, AIs today process information in volumes and at rates no human brain can comprehend. And they are about to get a potent steroidal injection called quantum computing, which will fuel a major new round of AI acceleration.

The rise of AI cannot be attributed solely to better computing resources. AIs are competent in unsupervised learning — no humans needed. Their learning curve is like a weird M.C. Escher staircase that continually goes up. They solve problems in ways that boggle human experts. They don’t yet have the unique adaptability of the human mind, nor our signature cultural and social skills. But to think that AIs will not quickly evolve specialized forms of intelligence far superior to our own strikes me as incredibly naive.

Still, resistance is not futile. Not yet.

In 2018, I wrote a book on the new “lightspeed learners,” as I called them: the world’s smartest, fastest-evolving AIs. My thesis: AI is going to be huge — and the U.S. needs a new national AI plan to harness it. The final chapters of the book presented an urgent set of AI policy recommendations for America. The book sold well to libraries and universities, and Rowman & Littlefield, the publisher, just issued a new 2023 paperback edition. But in terms of impacting American AI policy, it was a pebble in the ocean.

I then logged three years as a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, a venerable D.C. think tank, where I consulted on U.S. AI policy. My takeaway: To call our current AI policy a can of worms would be an insult to annelids.

Webster’s should issue a new definition of futility: attempting to explain AI to politicians. I’ve tried. Members of Congress would conflate AI with social media — and those were the tech-savvy ones. More than one politician asked me why we couldn’t just unplug wayward AIs, and a red-state congressperson suggested AI was a fad. He also insisted that despite testimony given to the House Transportation Committee, “those pointy-headed SOBs will never back an 18-wheeler into a loading dock. No way.” To be fair, this was six years ago.

But Washington is finally waking up to the importance of AI, with a growing bipartisan movement advocating regulation. The meme in Congress is that we need “transparency and safeguards” to channel the best of AI while thwarting its most dangerous threats. If Congress simply requires all AIs to be transparent and have safeguards, the thinking goes, everything will be fine.

But transparency in AI is overrated. Enact whatever laws you like, throw tons of money at AI transparency regulation — and we still won’t have any idea how a specific AI works. I had unfettered access to every element of the NeuralEye system — algorithm, application code, training data, test data, 70-page patents, expert analyses — but to this day I have no concept of how NeuralEye matched Zachie with his father. I’m sure there’s a logical explanation somewhere in the cosmos, but the calculus is simply too big for my puny human brain. I’m all for corporations disclosing data collection and AI-use practices, but technical AI transparency is a mirage.

The issue of congressionally mandated AI safeguards is more nuanced. Ideally, each AI would come with guardrails to protect humans against its potential excesses. But given that no one understands precisely how AI works, that AIs often surprise us and that AI grows and evolves at lightspeed — what guardrails could a bickering Congress construct to protect us? How could its laws and regulations change fast enough to keep up with AI?

The U.S. is the world’s AI leader, by a lightyear or two. Most of our AI is controlled by Big Tech: Microsoft/Open AI, Alphabet/Google, Meta, Amazon, Nvidia, Tesla. Each is a hypercompetitive business with tremendous resources, including the highest concentration of AI talent on the planet. These companies have grown rich and powerful by building tech largely free of U.S. regulatory constraints, in a marketplace we American citizens constructed for them. They have all benefited greatly from seven decades of world-class AI research funded by American taxpayers. Big Tech itself has skin in the AI game.

But so do we.

AI is not the kind of tech that can be invented in a Harvard dorm or a startup garage in Silicon Valley. Open AI spends half a billion dollars on Nvidia infrastructure for each new AI model it launches. It has taken years of scientific study, lab research and application development — not to mention a massive investment of government dollars — to construct the AI foundation Big Tech now controls. Big Tech has leveraged this foundation to achieve company valuations in the trillions. Keep this in mind as I offer a modest proposal:

We need a new governing body for AI in America — one that could wield the powers of the state to steer the technology toward a human mitzvah, rather than a human disaster. Call it the “Humane AI Commission.”

Luckily, history offers a model.

In 1947, President Harry Truman yanked control of nuclear weapons away from the military and handed it to five American civilians — the newly formed Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). The AEC operated inside government, but well removed from politics. As Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer made clear, the AEC was not without its flaws. But it kept the world free of nuclear bombs during the most dangerous decades of the Cold War. Nolan himself has likened AI to the nuclear threat in recent interviews, while cautioning that AI might be even harder to control.

The AEC model is not a perfect fit for AI — it was too slow and static, for one thing — but it is instructive. AEC took ownership of all nuclear reactors, putting it in a position of ultimate control. The federal government’s role in nationalizing nuclear weapons was that of owner, not operator — it outsourced most of the work. The military possessed finished bombs, Westinghouse built and operated nuclear energy plants, but the AEC controlled the core and had all the leverage. The AEC also owned and operated the best nuclear research labs on the planet, including Los Alamos, Oak Ridge and Livermore. Historically, and legally, the Atomic Energy Commission provides a useful precedent for when America creates technology that could potentially end life as we know it — a category into which AI clearly falls.

The case to nationalize the “nuclear reactors” of AI — the world’s most advanced AI models — hinges on this question: Who do we want to control AI’s nuclear codes? Big Tech CEOs answering to a few billionaire shareholders, or the government of the United States, answering to its citizens?

Let me be the first to acknowledge that a federal program wresting control of AI’s “nuclear reactors” from Microsoft, Google, et al., would be a monumental — and painful — undertaking. But all our other options are worse.

Let’s start with the AI pause option, a position advanced recently by hundreds of first-class AI experts in a signed open letter. Their idea is to halt major AI development temporarily so we can all take a deep breath. Get our arms around AI, so to speak. The letter was good theater, little else. If the U.S. were to freeze AI development (assuming that’s even possible), China would be the main beneficiary. The Chinese Communist Party has already used AI to spy on Uyghurs and dissenters, and the Red Army is all-in on AI. But China is a perhaps the world leader in AI education, starting with early age students, and an AI called CityBrain runs all traffic and emergency response systems in Hangzhou, a city of 8 million. A US/China treaty on AI could be a major step toward a world with safer, more humane AI. But as someone who lived in China a few years, I fear the only thing worse than a world controlled by runaway AI would be a global AI infrastructure run by President Xi Jinping. (Xi has stated publicly, more than once, that world AI dominance is one of his personal goals for China).

Next, we have the let-the-free-market-decide option. To be clear, this is what propelled America into its position as the world’s AI leader. What our Big Tech companies have done with AI is astounding to other nations. But as experts warn of potential societal threats like runaway AI, allowing Big Tech to operate AI unfettered would be like Truman entrusting nuclear bombs to Westinghouse.

A third option is regulation of AI by current agencies of the U.S. government. As a West Coast techie who has worked extensively in D.C., my first thought is: Good luck with that. There are practical federal regulatory actions that should be taken immediately: stronger AI export controls; new AI development reporting requirements for corporations; deepfake watermarking rules. But run-of-the-mill federal regulation is no match for runaway AI, nor the bad actors who will try to use AI against us. Many types of AI regulation — including the complex FDA-style approval models often advocated by Big Tech — would make it much harder for small companies to put AI to work. Except for very specific “rifle shots,” as they call narrow regulatory bills in Congress, federal AI regulation won’t work.

What remains is the Truman option — a bold stroke of executive leadership. Here’s one scenario:

Within the first 100 days after the 2024 inauguration, the president announces a new, national AI emergency plan. The president explains that the goal of this plan is global AI leadership for generations to come. Benevolent, peaceful leadership. Leadership that guides AI’s rise as a boon to humanity. Leadership that defends the U.S. against bad actors using AI, and that installs human controls in the DNA of the most powerful AIs. Yes, that will require the federal government to take control of certain critical domestic AI resources, just as FDR temporarily nationalized parts of General Motors, Kaiser Shipyards and other manufacturing giants to fuel America’s victory in WWII.

The new Humane AI Commission would be run by a diverse team of AI experts, and strive to be as apolitical as possible. Fortunately, AI policy in America has not yet been hyper-politicized. Republicans want a strong U.S. AI policy vis a vis China, and Democrats want racially unbiased AIs that fight climate change and create new jobs. Both agendas can be served, without contradiction, by an aggressive, capable new national AI plan — with the HAIC at the center.

Our best hope is not to suppress AI, but to harness it in ways that align with humanity’s interests. The only entity on earth with both the resources and values necessary to harness AI effectively and humanely is the government of the United States. Managing AI on a global scale could well be America’s greatest scientific and diplomatic challenge, ever. The Manhattan Project, cubed.

An undertaking this important should be subject to the democratic process, flawed though it may be. An HAIC would place the future of AI — and with it, the future of humanity — into the hands of the public. But whatever happens, every concerned citizen should learn more about AI, because we American voters are about to have some crucial decisions to make. As Bette Davis said in All About Eve, working from a subtle, Oscar-winning script I believe not even a future AI could write: “Fasten your seat belts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.”

POLITICO

Politico

4. President Biden must work with Congress to promote American interests in Asia-Pacific region

President Biden must work with Congress to promote American interests in Asia-Pacific region

BY REP. MICHELLE STEEL (R-CALIF.), OPINION CONTRIBUTOR - 08/28/23 1:30 PM ET

https://thehill.com/opinion/congress-blog/4174852-president-biden-must-work-with-congress-to-promote-american-interests-in-asia-pacific/

AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File

FILE – U.S. President Joe Biden, left, talks with Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, right, ahead of a trilateral meeting on the sidelines of the G7 Summit in Hiroshima, Japan, May 21, 2023.

Earlier this month, President Joe Biden, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida convened at Camp David to discuss North Korea and the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) increasing hostility and roll out a series of economic and military-centered initiatives.  

As a proud American who was born in South Korea, lived in Japan and is now a member of Congress from Southern California, these developments are extremely promising and personally very encouraging. I have been very vocal in advocating for the healing of relations between Japan and South Korea. Only by working together can we hope to successfully stop the CCP’s bid for global dominance. That is why I sent a letter to President Yoon ahead of his address to Congress in April, commending his ongoing work to improve relations between South Korea and Japan, and encouraging trilateral relations with the United States. 

Since being elected, I have been committed to the prosperity and peace that comes with this trilateral partnership, and I remind officials from all three countries anytime we meet. Our three countries are a beacon of freedom in the region and together can ensure prosperity for all. While the summit was a great step towards this future, there is still much work to be done. There are already strong steps towards deterrence and military cooperation being taken, but there is still more work to do on economic security.  

I recently returned from bipartisan congressional trade meetings in Asia that included meetings in South Korea with President Yoon and other ministers. It is imperative we use this momentum to establish a strong foundation that will stabilize the Pacific region and bring economic benefits to all three economies and the region. We can do that with strong trade agreements that will enhance economic, security and other benefits including technological advancements. 

Japan and South Korea have increased their investment within the United States in recent years, and with new technologies being developed, that investment could grow with time. This will create high-paying jobs within the U.S. that will boost local economies. 

It is concerning, however, that President Biden is trying to circumvent Congress by negotiating the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity (IPEF) without congressional approval. Congress has constitutional authority over trade, and there is a bipartisan coalition of members who are ready to work on effective, shared commitments to peace and our economic partnership within the law as dictated by the Constitution.  

The United States stands to benefit greatly from the elimination of economic barriers on goods going to the Asia-Pacific region. The lack of U.S. involvement in major trade agreements in the region has created a major void. The world’s largest free trade agreement (the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership), which came into effect last year, is based in the region. The United States is not a participant. It would be beneficial for the U.S. to explore a comprehensive free trade agreement that involves likeminded allies. If President Biden works with Congress, we can eliminate economic barriers and improve partnerships that reflect our values while improving the market access for exporters across the United States. 

America and our allies need to stay at the cutting edge of innovation, and it is time for President Biden to work with Congress to ensure we are engaged with constitutionally supported agreements. This administration has struggled to create meaningful progress in our foreign policy that benefit Americans, but together we can establish agreements with strong standards and ensure that we hold our trading partners accountable through tough and consistent enforcement that will create more U.S. jobs.  

As a proud Korean American who immigrated to the United States from Japan, I was encouraged by the historical trilateral summit held at Camp David. There is strength in unity, and I hope more will come from this summit. We cannot waste time. President Biden must work with Congress on proper economic agreements that promote American interest.  

Michelle Steel represents California’s 45th District. 

5. Russia Is Poised To Upend the 'Diplomatic Chessboard' in Ukraine  by John Bolton

Excerpts:

Biden could outmaneuver Republicans opposing Ukraine aid by endorsing a cease-fire and negotiations, speaking directly with Putin, and urging both sides to compromise. He could contest the 2024 election as America’s peacemaker, thereby confounding Donald Trump, who thought he was the apple of Putin’s eye. What would Trump do, reinvent himself as a hawk?

Biden has hardly been a successful war President. The White House’s hesitation to supply one weapons system after another, its undisguised fear of Russian escalation and the onset of World War III, perhaps in a nuclear form, and its general slowness and inattention at the presidential level signal hand-wringing, not hawkishness. There is currently no evidence Moscow is capable of escalating with conventional arms, nor any sign that its nuclear saber-rattling is anything but pure bluff. The sad truth is that Biden’s policy is sputtering, Ukraine could be a political liability, and he may well be looking for a way out. A bold Putin diplomatic maneuver could provide just the pretext Biden needs. Faced with his major international allies heading for the tall grass, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky would be left in a nearly untenable position.

It is long past time for a more effective strategy to achieve the oft-stated objectives of restoring full Ukrainian sovereignty and territorial integrity, and to provide aid to Ukraine more coherently. Across NATO, therefore, and especially in Washington, Paris, and Berlin, Ukraine’s supporters need to sharpen and augment their arguments that continued opposition to Russia’s aggression is critical for Western security.

These arguments must be raised now, with summer ending and Washington coming back to life. Otherwise, Moscow might grab the diplomatic steering wheel, with grave consequences all around.

Russia Is Poised To Upend the 'Diplomatic Chessboard' in Ukraine

President Vladimir Putin is reasserting his power in Russia, and he could be poised to upend the diplomatic chessboard in Ukraine. Washington and the West seem unprepared to react effectively. 

19fortyfive.com · by John Bolton · August 28, 2023

In recent months, Russia has seen considerable political turmoil, but there has been little change on the battlefield in Ukraine. Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin’s mutiny and subsequent assassination have dominated the news while Moscow and Kyiv remain, with modest exceptions, militarily gridlocked. As autumn approaches, however, President Vladimir Putin is reasserting his power in Russia, and he could be poised to upend the diplomatic chessboard in Ukraine. Washington and the West seem unprepared to react effectively.

Putin Tightens His Grip

After Prigozhin’s mutiny, many experts confidently explained that Putin was deeply wounded and his fall was inevitable, if not imminent. Today, these same observers say Prigozhin’s demise unleashes unseen networks of his supporters, seeking revenge.

The Kremlin’s inner workings remain obscure, so no predictions are assured. Nonetheless, Putin is now significantly more secure than he was before the mutiny, even if he has not fully regained his pre-February 2022 dominance.

Consider the hand he holds. Prigozhin is dead, as Putin first proclaimed and Russian authorities later confirmed. Also reportedly killed near Tver last week were Dmitry Utkin, Prigozhin’s top Wagner Group deputy (effectively its military commander) and other top advisors. Putin wants to preserve Wagner’s assets and personnel around the world, and one reason he took two months to eliminate Prigozhin was to ensure his own loyalists controlled the organization. That process may remain incomplete, but Putin has not been asleep.

Moreover, regular military officers who outed themselves by backing Prigozhin are being purged in time-honored Stalinist fashion. Sergey Surovikin, former commander of Russia’s aerospace forces, has been dismissed, notwithstanding that the so-called Surovikin Line has held up well against Ukraine’s offensive. Other Prigozhin collaborators are most likely on the lam. They are heading for the nearest international border, not spinning new plots to overthrow Putin.

That Putin has internal opposition is hardly surprising. “Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown” is a blazing Shakespearean insight, and it was not crafted uniquely anticipating today’s Russia. The real question in coming months is whether Putin can capitalize on his opponents’ disarray to regain the political and diplomatic momentum that Russia’s faltering battlefield performance has all but lost.

Russia’s Needs and Its Leverage

Any sensible evaluation of Russia’s current geopolitical position concludes that Moscow needs time to seriously reform and rebuild its embarrassingly poor military assets, reinvigorate its economy by ending Western sanctions, and escape political isolation. Putin’s dreamy fascination with recreating the Russian Empire may obscure such reasoning, but he is also a cold-blooded realist, particularly with his own security at stake. Westerners may find it hard to believe, but Putin’s harshest Russian critics are not “anti-war” but “anti-losing.” A stronger Putin is now able, with less concern about domestic second-guessing, to throw NATO into disarray diplomatically, reopening and inflaming existing Western disagreements and discontent with the Ukraine war, thereby buying the time Russia needs to recover and regroup.

If Kyiv’s spring offensive does not produce major battlefield progress, Putin could, without warning, propose a cease-fire within the next two months along existing battle lines and immediately open negotiations. Everything could be on the table, including ending economic warfare against the combatants. Putin might choreograph China’s endorsement of his proposal, with Beijing offering to be a mediator, perhaps suggesting a willingness to help rebuild the war zones in both Russia and Ukraine.

Putin’s key leverage would be Ukraine’s relative lack of success in the summer offensive. In an age of short attention spans, political leaders in Berlin, Paris, and even Washington would be sorely tempted to accept a cease-fire and enter negotiations. In Europe, despite surface rhetorical support for Ukraine, levels of military and financial aid have been slow, grudging, and inadequate. Even though reserves of natural gas may seem sufficient for the coming winter, many will want to put the conflict behind them. Who is certain, for example, that France’s Emmanuel Macron would not jump at the chance to be seen as a peacemaker?

What the West Should Do Now

In America, President Joe Biden faces an uncertain 2024 election. While the press has relished covering the emergence of isolationist, anti-Ukraine-aid Republicans, it has ignored leftist Democrats. In October, 2022, the House Progressive Caucus committed the classic Washington gaffe of saying aloud what they actually believed, issuing a letter conditioning support for further Ukraine aid on Kyiv opening talks with Moscow. The letter was hastily retracted, due to the imminent midterm elections, but the progressive position remains unchanged.

Biden could outmaneuver Republicans opposing Ukraine aid by endorsing a cease-fire and negotiations, speaking directly with Putin, and urging both sides to compromise. He could contest the 2024 election as America’s peacemaker, thereby confounding Donald Trump, who thought he was the apple of Putin’s eye. What would Trump do, reinvent himself as a hawk?

Biden has hardly been a successful war President. The White House’s hesitation to supply one weapons system after another, its undisguised fear of Russian escalation and the onset of World War III, perhaps in a nuclear form, and its general slowness and inattention at the presidential level signal hand-wringing, not hawkishness. There is currently no evidence Moscow is capable of escalating with conventional arms, nor any sign that its nuclear saber-rattling is anything but pure bluff. The sad truth is that Biden’s policy is sputtering, Ukraine could be a political liability, and he may well be looking for a way out. A bold Putin diplomatic maneuver could provide just the pretext Biden needs. Faced with his major international allies heading for the tall grass, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky would be left in a nearly untenable position.

It is long past time for a more effective strategy to achieve the oft-stated objectives of restoring full Ukrainian sovereignty and territorial integrity, and to provide aid to Ukraine more coherently. Across NATO, therefore, and especially in Washington, Paris, and Berlin, Ukraine’s supporters need to sharpen and augment their arguments that continued opposition to Russia’s aggression is critical for Western security.

These arguments must be raised now, with summer ending and Washington coming back to life. Otherwise, Moscow might grab the diplomatic steering wheel, with grave consequences all around.

About the Author, Ambassador John R. Bolton

Ambassador John R. Bolton served as national security adviser under President Donald J. Trump. He is the author of “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir.” You can follow him on Twitter: @AmbJohnBolton.

From the Vault

‘Sir, We Hit a Russian Submarine’: A U.S. Navy Sub Collided with a Nuclear Attack Sub

Did A Russian-Made Missile ‘Strike’ an F-35 Fighter?

19fortyfive.com · by John Bolton · August 28, 2023

6. Pentagon bets on quick production of autonomous systems to counter China

Pentagon bets on quick production of autonomous systems to counter China

Politico

Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks will formally announce the initiative Monday.

The ambitious effort, named Replicator, will be spearheaded by Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks. | Andrew Harnik/AP Photo

08/28/2023 08:49 AM EDT

The Pentagon is about to make a huge bet that it can field thousands of autonomous systems within two years — an attempt to use technological innovation to counter China’s much larger stockpile of traditional weapons.

The ambitious effort, named Replicator, will be spearheaded by Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks, who previewed the push in an interview. Hicks will formally announce the initiative Monday in a speech at the National Defense Industrial Association’s Emerging Technologies for Defense Conference.

China, China, China: Hicks said the time is right to push to rapidly scale up innovative technology. The move comes as the U.S. looks to get creative to deter China in the Indo-Pacific and Pentagon leadership has taken stock of how Ukraine has fended off Russia’s invasion.

“Industry is ready. The culture is ready to shift,” Hicks said. “We have to drive that from the top, and we need to give it a hard target.”

“The great paradox of military innovation is you’re going to have to make big bets and you’ve got to execute on those bets,” she added.

The plan: With Replicator, the Pentagon aims to have thousands of autonomous systems across various domains produced and delivered in 18 to 24 months.

Hicks declined to discuss what specific platforms might be produced under the program — such as aerial drones or unmanned ships — citing the “competition landscape” in the defense industry as well as concerns about tipping DOD’s hand to China. The Pentagon will instead “say more as we get to production on capabilities.”

Why now: The Pentagon is pushing to counter threats posed by China in the Pacific amid concerns that Beijing may accrue the military might needed to invade Taiwan before the decade is out.

Defense leaders are also fighting an arduous battle to quickly ramp up the industrial base to replenish military inventories of missiles and other weapons that have been sent to Ukraine, but that could also be of use in a China-Taiwan conflict.

Why this tech: Autonomous weapons are seen as a potential way to counter China’s numerical advantages in ships, missiles and troops in a rapidly narrowing window. Fielding large numbers of cheap, expendable drones, proponents argue, is faster and lower-cost than exquisite weapons systems and puts fewer troops at risk.

Rinse, repeat: Another major aim of the Replicator initiative is to provide a template for future efforts to rapidly field military technology.

She said lessons from the Replicator program could be applied throughout the Pentagon, military services and combatant commands.

“The pieces that work well, they can be replicated throughout the department where they see what we’ve been able to do,” Hicks said. “So if it’s cutting years off of a process because we’ve got the standards figured out and right. If it’s because there’s a lack of communication between two components and we fixed that problem, that kind of speeding can happen through this formal process.”

Funding: Hicks predicted the price tag would be in the hundreds of millions of dollars rather than billions of dollars. She noted that the Pentagon is harnessing many programs that are already underway, but added the Pentagon may need to “augment” some spending.

“Dollars are not the major challenge,” Hicks said. “Getting the production up and running and getting it at scale is.”

POLITICO

Politico

7. Why Is the Reputation of the U.S. Military Going South So Fast?

This left me hanging. Based on the headline I was hoping for more. But Ricks provides some interesting reviews of three books.

Why Is the Reputation of the U.S. Military Going South So Fast?

Republicans are worried about the politics that shape our armed forces. Several recent books look at the good, the bad and the ugly of American military leadership and culture.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/29/books/review/good-and-bad-in-military-history-new-books.html?utm

• Share full article

U.S. service members practicing meditation during a mindfulness training class.Credit...Grant Hindsley for The New York Times

By Thomas E. Ricks

Thomas E. Ricks, the Book Review’s military history columnist, is the author of eight books, including “Waging a Good War: How the Civil Rights Movement Won Its Battles, 1954-1968.”

Aug. 29, 2023, 5:00 a.m. ET

In the years and months since the U.S. withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan, public respect for our armed forces has been plummeting toward levels not seen since the end of the American war in Vietnam.

This new wave of skepticism is coming not just from the left, which has long been leery of the military, but also from the right. In a recent Gallup poll, public confidence in the military was still relatively high at 60 percent — much more than any other major public institution — but had declined sharply, especially among Republicans.

Conservatives are expressing concern about more than the collapse of U.S. nation-building efforts in the Middle East. Earlier this summer, the Republican senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama denounced the Pentagon’s leaders as too “woke.” He is now holding up the promotion of hundreds of senior officers, which has left the Marine Corps without a commandant for the first time in 164 years, the Army without a chief and, as of this month, kept Adm. Lisa Franchetti from assuming the top position in the Navy. She would be the first woman in the Navy’s two-and-a-half-century existence to hold the post.

Tuberville and his ilk apparently believe that abortion access and drag shows at military bases have been a corrupting force on our servicemen and women, so it might be helpful to look back at some actual moments of moral and strategic failing in the ranks of the American armed forces to get a sense of perspective. GENERALS AND ADMIRALS, CRIMINALS AND CROOKS: Dishonorable Leadership in the U.S. Military (University of Notre Dame, 399 pp., $38) is subtler than its title indicates. It is actually a thoughtful study of the ways in which power corrupts.

The author, Jeffery J. Matthews, a historian at the University of Puget Sound, depicts recent U.S. Navy leadership as especially bad. In Matthews’s telling, the modern Navy has had three major scandals that involved admirals. He reminds us that in the 1980s, Vice Adm. John Poindexter was in the middle of the Reagan administration’s benighted scheme to facilitate the illicit sale of high-tech weapons to Iran in exchange for hostages held in Lebanon and illegally use the profits to fund an anti-communist insurgency in Nicaragua.

More on U.S. Armed Forces

• Laid to Rest: Ian Fishback, an anti-torture whistle-blower during the U.S. occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, was buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery. He died at age 42 after entering a dizzying mental health spiral.
• Affirmative Action: Students for Fair Admissions won its Supreme Court case against Harvard and the University of North Carolina. Now, it’s focusing on a possible new target: military academies.
• Space Command: The Pentagon said that President Biden had canceled an order by former President Donald Trump to move the United States Space Command headquarters to Alabama.
• Military Justice Code: President Biden gave final approval to the biggest reshaping of the military legal system, stripping commanders of their authority over cases of sexual assault, rape and murder to ensure prosecutions that are independent of the chain of command.

The Navy’s next two episodes were even worse, Matthews suggests, because they involved entire subcultures within the service and showed that, when cleaning house, the Navy deployed investigators not to probe the actions of its top people but to protect them from outside scrutiny. In 1991, there were widespread complaints of sexual abuse at the “Tailhook” convention of naval aviators in Las Vegas. Navy investigators let leadership off the hook. Unsurprisingly, the inquiries were found to be “purposefully inadequate,” Matthews writes, after public pressure forced the Pentagon to look again.

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It turns out that the Navy chose not to question any of the more than 30 admirals and Marine Corps generals who had attended the alcohol-soaked gathering. In addition, the Pentagon found that the rear admiral in charge of the Naval Investigative Service didn’t pursue the inquiry seriously, because he did not believe that women should be in the military.

Amazingly, the Navy comes off even worse in Matthews’s account of the “Fat Leonard” scandal. Between 2006 and 2013, dozens of senior naval officers accepted bribes from a Malaysian defense contractor in exchange for overlooking his inflated invoices. Matthews portrays the Navy’s Pacific Fleet as a RICO-ish criminal enterprise.

Leonard Glenn Francis, the contractor for whom the affair is named, even penetrated the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, a connection that helped him quash inquiries into his activities. One party he threw in Manila for American Pacific Fleet officers featured a “rotating carousel of prostitutes.”

Ultimately, the bribery scheme cost American taxpayers at least $35 million. Legal cases are still pending, but so far more than 30 Navy officials and contractors have been convicted or pleaded guilty, including one admiral who was sentenced to 18 months in prison for committing federal crimes while on active duty, which is another naval first.

One of the lessons Matthews draws is that the American military tends not to investigate senior officers as vigorously as it does junior ones. Another is that Congress has to get involved to remedy that tendency. The Navy did not take Tailhook seriously until the Senate Armed Services Committee put all its officer promotions on hold.

Of all the top leaders in American history, probably no one got away with breaking rules and disregarding orders as much as Douglas MacArthur. The consensus on him among historians has been that he was indeed insubordinate, but that to survive as a general long enough to defy three presidents — Hoover, F.D.R. and Truman — he had to be pretty effective as a commander.

Not so, James Ellman argues in MACARTHUR RECONSIDERED: General Douglas MacArthur as a Wartime Commander (Stackpole, 277 pp., $29.95). Reviewing MacArthur’s performances in World War II and the Korean War, he concludes that the general was a mediocre commander who lacked interest in details, packed his staff with incompetent bootlickers and often lied in trying to justify his actions.

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And, of course, he was quite insubordinate, with an alarming tendency to ignore orders and contradict stated policies. In a charge I hadn’t seen before, Ellman alleges that, while Truman sought détente in the Korean War early in 1951, MacArthur took it upon himself to aggravate relations with China and thus extended the war by two years, a period during which more than 13,000 American soldiers died. Truman fired MacArthur shortly thereafter.

By contrast, Lt. Gen. William Simpson, a more capable Army general of World War II, is hardly known today. So it is good to see the veteran armor officer William Stuart Nance’s COMMANDING PROFESSIONALISM: Simpson, Moore, and the Ninth U.S. Army (University Press of Kentucky, 196 pp., paperback, $30) cast an appreciative light on his style of leadership, which was best displayed during the Battle of the Bulge in the winter of 1944-45.

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The lanky Texan commanded a force of 341,000 men and got along with everyone, including Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, a man who was arguably the British version of MacArthur and who, Nance writes, “might well have given Patton an aneurysm.” Simpson, low-key and quiet, kept his cool.

To be honest, the resulting look at Simpson’s approach to command style is a bit dull and repetitive. But that may be the point: In war, slow and steady tends to beat fast and flashy. In any case, they’re both better than incompetent, amoral and corrupt.

8. Fighting to Win: Ukraine, Russia, and the War for Survival

A long read.  

Interesting conclusion:

One question about winning the peace is can other alternatives, such as the proposed Israel or South Korea models, suffice instead of NATO membership?

In short, no. Neither model can prevent war from breaking out again. As Eliot Cohen noted in a recent Atlantic article, the “Israel model,” wherein the United States guaranteed Israel’s ability to counter and defeat any credible conventional military threat, is a dubious analogy for Ukraine and a bad idea. He noted that this policy did not arise until after Israel had defeated the Arab states in four conventional wars and had developed nuclear weapons. Ukraine’s postwar demography and economy cannot put it in the same position as Israel relative to its enemies and Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons based, in part, on US security assurances.[22]

The South Korea model, an armistice along the current front line,[23] means a frozen conflict until one side regains enough strength to start fighting again. It is Russia’s preferred solution, has been rejected by Ukraine, and would create an unstable situation on the continent like a permanently smoldering fuse next to a powder keg. Furthermore, proponents of this option fail to recognize that what has kept South Korea safe for decades was not an armistice but the stationing there of tens of thousands of US soldiers and at one time nuclear weapons.

The final question is what if Russia breaks apart and we face the specter of loose nuclear weapons and another Russian Civil War?

Russia just might break apart. As noted in a previous FPRI paper, the loss of Crimea could lead to Putin’s downfall, political violence including even civil war, and the possible disintegration of parts of the Russian Federation.[24] The United States must prepare for this possibility and have plans to deal with the threats posed to Russia’s nuclear inventory just as we had to during the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Empires end and there is nothing observers can do about it if the empire’s rulers cannot. Despite the dangers, the end of the Russian empire would mean the end of Russian imperialism, which would be beneficial for long term stability in Europe and the geopolitical position of the United States.

Fighting to Win: Ukraine, Russia, and the War for Survival - Foreign Policy Research Institute

fpri.org · by Philip Wasielewski

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Philip Wasielewski

Philip Wasielewski is the Director of FPRI's Center for the Study of Intelligence and Nontraditional Warfare and a 2023 Templeton Fellow. He is a former Paramilitary Case Officer who had a 31-year career in the Directorate of Operations of the Central Intelligence Agency. 

https://www.fpri.org/article/2023/08/fighting-to-win-ukraine-russia-and-the-war-for-survival/?mc_cid=6b498f9c7c

Introduction 

I arrived in Kyiv this July after a thirteen-hour overnight train ride in a clean but austere Soviet-era railway car. Since I couldn’t purchase a return ticket in Poland, immediately upon arrival at the train station I went to the international ticket counter and enjoyed the old Soviet practice of queuing. For almost an hour the ticket clerk shuffled paperwork in front of a clamoring crowd, which she ignored. When she finally started waiting on her customers, I received my turn half an hour later and was rudely informed that the tickets I wanted were only sold on-line and were sold out.

Realizing the futility of arguing, I moved through an ensemble of taxi drivers and streetwise money changers hectoring for my business to find a currency exchange kiosk. The money changer, whose service etiquette harkened back to the Brezhnev era, rejected several bills due to the tiniest of tears or other disqualifying marks. When I finally had enough cash for a taxi ride and breakfast, I walked across the railway station plaza to a rundown building housing a McDonalds.

Doing so, I reflected on my experiences in post-Soviet states in the 1990s and felt that I had just traveled back in time to that era. However, approaching the clean, well lit McDonalds counter, I was greeted by a young lady with a smile, helpful attitude, and quick and efficient service. After an exhausting trip, I was overjoyed.

Those initial two hours of my first trip to Ukraine were the beginning of many experiences that would teach me how this country is evolving from its Soviet past to a new future. During my travels I encountered many other juxtapositions between Soviet-era and Western practices. The impression that I gained was that of a country moving away from the railway station ticket counter to the counter at the McDonalds. This paper, while primarily a politico-military analysis of a horrible war, will hopefully also present that view to the reader as well.

This paper will update my previous analysis[1] of the Russo-Ukraine War based on the events of the past fourteen months, including observations and conversations during a recent trip in mid-July 2023 to Kyiv. It will review the major shifts in the military situation since June 2022; discuss how Russia and Ukraine are gearing for a long war; provide an overview of current war aims and strategies to achieve them; discuss likely scenarios for the war over the next year; and examine the key role of Russian-occupied Crimea. The paper’s conclusion will explain the significance of these factors, and possible opportunities, for the security of the United States.

In June 2022, I wrote that Russian war aims had contracted from subjugating Ukraine to expanding the territory of the breakaway statelets it supposedly went to war to protect. By contrast, Ukraine’s war aims had grown from survival to recovery of all territory lost to Russia since 2014. These uncompromising objectives, the paper predicted, would lock Russia and Ukraine into a war of attrition with little hope of a negotiated settlement. In the fourteen months since that article, I see no change in the overall politico-military situation and no possible negotiations to end the war except for terms that a victor will provide the vanquished. The mutual investments in blood and treasure, and fears that losing the war means either losing power or independence, means the only way to end the war is for one side’s military to impose its will on the other. The only question is who will be the victor and vanquished in this war and what that will mean to the safety and security of the United States.

Kyiv, July 2023. A collection of steel anti-tank obstacles serve as an informal memorial to the first days of the war when they were used to block the capital’s streets against an expected Russian tank assault or as a supply point in case they are ever needed again. (Philip Wasielewski)

Key Findings

• Both the Kremlin and Ukrainians see the war as an existential conflict, even as a “holy war,” and are prepared to fight for years to achieve victory.
• Russian war aims vis-à-vis Ukraine have morphed into creating a “frozen conflict” to maintain its land bridge with Crimea. However, its primary war aim remains weakening NATO to regain its sphere of influence in the former Soviet republics and Warsaw Pact states. To achieve this, Russia will conduct a prolonged strategic defense in Ukraine to demonstrate that Ukraine will never regain its territorial integrity and to show that American support will eventually end as it has for other client states.
• Ukraine’s primary war aim of restoring its territorial integrity is shared across its society. To achieve this, Ukraine’s strategy is to break the will of the Russian army and then reclaim Crimea, even if that takes several years.
• Ukrainians do not fear a long war but an inconclusive one that reignites in five or ten years. They want to settle this conflict with Russia once and for all, and see NATO membership as the only way to prevent it from happening again.
• For US policymakers, the dangers arising from the war overshadow opportunities. One opportunity is a Russian defeat that can serve both as a brake against further Kremlin aggression and as a catalyst for Russia to possibly change her imperial identity. Another opportunity is the chance to strengthen NATO’s conventional forces and geographic position to give it an overwhelming advantage against any possible future Russian aggression. For that to happen, Ukraine must enter the alliance.

The View from the Ground

By June 2022, the military situation in Ukraine had improved for Kyiv. Russia withdrew its forces from northeastern Ukraine to reinforce its attacks in the south and southeast. The Donbas offensive provided Russia with some tactical successes and propaganda victories (e.g., Severodonetsk and later Bakhmut) but not a strategic one. Ukraine counterattacked in the early fall reoccupying Kupyansk and Kherson but this operation quickly reached a culminating point due to a lack of reserves and the equipment necessary to cross the Dnieper River. Russia mobilized approximately 300,000 men for its ground forces and mercilessly fed them into the fighting. General Sergey Surovikin took control of Russian forces, stabilized the front, and began constructing a series of fortified lines to protect Russia’s land bridge with Crimea.

President Vladimir Putin, however, disagreed with the idea of a strategic defense. He relieved Surovikin, and replaced him with the Chief of the Russian General Staff Valery Gerasimov who decided to make the crossroads town of Bakhmut the focus of a Verdun-like strategy to attrit the Ukrainian army. While Russia fought the battle of Bakhmut as its main effort, Ukraine fought it as an economy of force operation. Ukraine lost the town after nine months but gained time to create new mobile forces with Western equipment. Simultaneously, Russia gained time to complete the Surovikin line. However, it was the Russian army that was attrited at Bakhmut, especially its elite airborne forces and the mercenary Wagner Group, leading to serious morale problems. Wagner, led by its mercurial leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, staged an abortive mutiny in July 2023 and for the time being has been removed from Russia’s order of battle in Ukraine.

As Russia’s offensive culminated with seizing Bakhmut in late May 2023, Ukraine counterattacked. Ukraine forces are attacking in Zaporizhzhia and Donetsk oblasts along three axes. The first is from Orikhiv towards Melitopol; the second is from Velyka Novosilka along the Mokri Yaly River towards Berdyansk and/or Mariupol; and the third is around Bakhmut. Russian forces are conducting spoiling attacks in Luhansk oblast from their defenses near Svatove and Kreminna to fix Ukrainian forces in place and prevent them from joining the main effort.

Today, the world’s attention is fixed on Ukraine’s counteroffensive and whether it will shift the strategic correlation of forces for this war. As many have observed, Russian fortifications have slowed Ukraine’s attacks due to their depth, the surrounding terrain that provides long range fields of fire for anti-tank guided missiles, the immense number of mines laid in front of them, and the limited numbers of combat engineers and combat engineering equipment on the Ukrainian side. Ukrainian military experts note that Russia was able to build these lines because of Ukraine’s limited long range strike capabilities, both in missiles and aircraft, to disrupt these efforts. A debate in the Ukrainian military last winter whether to strike south sooner with forces available or wait until new units could be created with Western military equipment was resolved in favor of the latter approach. As of August, Ukrainian forces are attempting to find weak spots in the defensive lines and penetrate their various echelons in order to unleash mechanized reserves into the Russian rear and sever their lines of communication to Crimea.[2]

Sandbags protect a theater in Kyiv that is open for business. The sign on its front reads, “Glory to Ukraine and her heroes! We thank the Armed Forces of Ukraine for every quiet evening! Come to the theater – invest in the future!”(Philip Wasielewski)

Preparing for a Long War

Increasingly, Russia and Ukraine believe they are fighting an existential and even a “holy” war. Moreover, both sides are preparing to fight indefinitely until their war aims are achieved.

The View from the Kremlin

The term existential has become overused; but in describing the war in Ukraine, it is an accurate description of how the Kremlin perceives it. Putin is a student of Russian history and aware of the connection between failed wars and leadership changes. He has even publicly warned of the possibility of the history of 1917 repeating itself, a reference to the year of two revolutions that toppled a Tsar and Provisional Government.[3]

In authoritarian countries like Russia, it is hard to accurately gauge a society’s support for a war. Anti-war protests early in 2022 were quickly suppressed as was what was left of Russia’s independent media and political opposition. Most who opposed the war or feared serving in it have already fled and there has been a paucity of open dissent.

The Russian government has used television and the Russian Orthodox Church to promote the war. Russian television offers daily broadcasts with a litany of anti-Ukrainian, anti-Western, and pro-war messages. The Russian Orthodox Church has literally blessed the war and disciplined dissenting clergymen. Both the media and the Russian Orthodox Church echo the narrative that this is a war not just against Ukraine but against the West, which is characterized by both secular and religious commentators as “satanic.” Patriarch Kirill preaches that, “sacrifice in the course of carrying out your military duty washes away all sins,” sees Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a bulwark against a decadent West, and insists that “Russia has never attacked anyone.” Numerous figures from former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev to television host Vladimir Solovyov have used the term “holy war” to describe the conflict. This is the regular discourse that the average Russian hears daily from television and on Sundays from the pulpit (although less than 10 percent of Orthodox Russians are regular church goers).[4]

The greatest threat to Putin over his handling of the war comes from the ultra-patriotic right and accounts for the recent repression of those complaining about his leadership in the wake of the Prigozhin mutiny. Putin has to date balanced the need to mobilize Russia’s society and economy for the war while also shielding both as much as possible from the conflict to reduce the risk of social unrest. How long this will be possible is unknown. There are reports that the Kremlin may need to conduct a second mobilization for a prolonged war and despite relatively rosy International Monetary Fund projections, many observers expect a worsening economy as embargoes and limitations on Russian energy sales instituted in late 2022 take greater hold.[5]

In Kyiv, I found that some Ukrainian observers do not believe that sanctions will slow the Russian war machine. Andriy Klymenko, a member of Ukraine’s Black Sea Institute of Strategic Studies, believes Russia can and will sustain a long war. He says that it is impossible to seal off imports to a country like Russia with its immense borders and its allies helping avoid sanctions on energy sales and computer chips. He also believes that the imperial mindset of Russian officials, intellectuals, and even its poorer citizens will sustain the war at least into 2024.[6] Mykhailo Gonchar, president of Ukraine’s Center for Global Studies, agrees that Russia will be able to economically support the war for several years, noting that energy revenues from 2022 allowed Russia to increase defense spending in 2023 and that this will continue.[7]

Bakhmut, Ukraine.- In photos taken on July 10, 2023, members of the Ukrainian Armed Forces are deployed in the midst of the conflict with Russia. The Ukrainian army reported that its troops have so far retaken 169 square kilometers (more than 65 square miles) on the southern front and 24 square kilometers around the eastern city of Bakhmut since their counteroffensive began last month. (Reuters)

The View from Kyiv

Ukrainian society also views the war as existential. Most Ukrainians, witnessing war crimes in occupied territories, knowing of attempts to destroy the Ukrainian language and culture there, and undergoing daily attacks, believe that the Russians are fighting a genocidal war against them. Speaking directly with Ukrainian citizens during my visit, I came away with several clear impressions of how they see the war and are reacting to it.

The first is a distinct fear that defeat means losing their independence and national identity, and a determination not to let this happen. Closely following this is the impression that as a result of this war, Ukrainians of all backgrounds are developing a common national identity that has eluded them for the first thirty years of the country’s independence. Differences between the predominantly Ukrainian-speaking western part of the country and the predominantly Russian-speaking eastern and southern parts have diminished in the face of a common threat. The fact that Russia has visited the greatest amount of death and destruction on Ukraine’s Russian-speaking eastern and southern areas accounts for closing much of this gap.

Second, attacks against civilian targets strengthen Ukrainian resolve and reinforce to the average citizen what they are fighting for and against. This common danger has been another unifying force. Still, it comes at a cost. Most Ukrainians have themselves or know of those who have suffered death, injuries, or property destruction. The war has affected everyone. Ukrainian society is fatigued by war and fear and suffers at many levels, including cases of post-traumatic stress for civilians as well as soldiers. One lady, who worked at a suicide prevention hotline, told me that many people suffer but no one has yet to speak to her about wanting to give up in order to end the war.[8]

Third, Ukrainians are not blasé about the possibility of a nuclear strike on the battlefield or a city or the sabotage of Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, but are not deterred by Russian nuclear threats and believe they have no choice but to persevere in their fight or be destroyed as a nation. As another interlocutor told me, “We are adapting to the war because we have no choice but to adapt.”[9] It was clear from conversations across a wide swath of Ukrainian society that the average citizen is mentally preparing for a long war because they respect Russia’s size and capabilities but also are fighting for the goals President Volodymyr Zelensky has articulated—the return of Ukraine to its internationally recognized 1991 borders. They are past any possibility of compromising with Russia and want Crimea back even if it takes several more years of fighting.

Fourth, both military and civilian interlocutors note the great moral authority that the Ukrainian military has gained from the war and say that as long as the military is fighting, society will support them. They do not fear a long war but an inconclusive one that reignites in five or ten years. Ukrainians want to settle this conflict with Russia once and for all and see NATO membership as the only way to prevent it from happening again. 

Finally, Ukrainians are fully aware of Western support and extremely thankful for it. They acknowledge that even with the bravery of their military, they cannot fight this war without Western support. While they are not concerned about the staying power of Ukrainian society, they are concerned about the staying power of the United States. Their greatest nightmare is an agreement over their heads by the United States, Russia, and China. Ukrainians are also concerned that Russian disinformation, which places blame for the war on Ukraine, will be believed and that inflation and other economic problems in neighboring countries caused by the war will diminish their support. The average Ukrainian is well informed about domestic politics in Western countries—especially the United States—and recognizes that the longer a war lasts, the more important allies and resources become.

Assessing Russian and Ukrainian War Aims and Strategies

Russia

Russia’s initial war aims, infamously expressed as “denazification and demilitarization,” were only partly about making Ukraine its vassal. Moscow’s primary aim was to eject American power from its former Soviet sphere of influence. As Russia massed its troops on Ukraine’s borders, its demands were directed at the West and not Kyiv. On December 17, 2021, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Rybakov demanded written guarantees that Ukraine would never join the NATO alliance; NATO troops would be withdrawn from all former Warsaw Pact states; NATO would end military cooperation with Ukraine and Caucasian and Central Asian states; and America would withdraw its nuclear weapons from Europe. Ignoring Kyiv, the Russian Foreign Ministry put forward two draft treaties, one for NATO and one for the United States, and Rybakov called for Washington to act quickly and suggested a meeting in Geneva the next day to begin negotiations on Russia’s demands.[10]     

When this diktat was not accepted, Moscow attempted a coup de main of rapidly advancing armored and airborne units to seize Kyiv and other cities, decapitate the Ukrainian government, and activate a Fifth Column of collaborators. This strategy hoped to replicate the successful Soviet coup de main operations in Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Afghanistan in 1979. Its instigators failed to remember the more recent failure of this strategy in Chechnya in 1994.

When it was evident that these war aims were unachievable, Moscow unofficially shifted its goals vis-à-vis Ukraine to the complete occupation of the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts in eastern Ukraine and the institutionalization of Russian rule in occupied southern Ukraine. Using a strategy of attrition to destroy the Ukrainian army, it launched an offensive into the Donbas, which never achieved its aims.

Moscow’s larger objectives vis-à-vis NATO and American power never altered. The most recent announcement of Russia’s war aims coincided with the NATO Summit in Vilnius. On July 12, 2023, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov repeated in an interview that Russia’s war aims were the protection of the population of Donbas; the demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine (i.e., regime change); and the elimination of security threats that emanate from the territory of Ukraine.

Lavrov claims that in negotiations between February and April 2022, Ukraine agreed to never join NATO and confirm its nuclear free status, and insists that Kyiv accept those criteria and acquiesce to the incorporation of occupied territory into the Russian Federation.

The key parts of Lavrov’s interview were not the repetition of Moscow’s maximalist position but remarks regarding the “stubborn desire of Kyiv and its Western curators to escalate hostilities,” and how the West had “arrogantly rejected” Russia’s desire for security guarantees on its western borders. Lavrov made clear that, “the aggressive steps of unfriendly states pose an existential threat to Russia. There is no doubt about it. We will have to defend our right to free and sovereign development by all available means … This is about the collective West.”[11]

These remarks demonstrate two key points of Russia’s war aims. First is the imperial belief that Ukraine has no agency, the ability to make one’s own decisions, and therefore is nothing more than a Western puppet. Second, Moscow believes this war is rooted in Western aggression against Russia for which Ukraine was only an instrument.

Therefore, Russia remains focused on its overarching strategic goal to diminish American power and believes it can achieve this goal by attacking US resolve. To do so it has shifted its military strategy to a strategic defense. Moscow’s goal is to attrit Ukrainian forces and hold onto as much territory as possible so Washington loses hope that Ukraine will regain its full territorial integrity. The Kremlin’s aim is to create a “frozen conflict,” which it could claim as a victory by securing a land bridge to Crimea and demonstrating the limits of Western, specifically American, resolve. Russia’s strategy now is not to outlast Kyiv but Washington.   

This is also a strategy of nihilism (i.e., deterrence by punishment) which prevents an opponent from acting because the costs are too high. In the Kremlin’s mind, the destruction of Ukraine’s economy and cities, the decades-long consequences of mines and unexploded ordnance in her fertile fields, and the uncertainty of the whereabouts of millions of her citizens in the occupied areas (many deported to Russia, especially children) will serve as a warning to its neighbors, NATO members or not, about what happens to those who anger Moscow. If this strategy works, if a lack of support creates a “frozen conflict” in Ukraine, it could begin a process of splitting the NATO alliance as Washington will be seen as being self-deterred by a combination of fears of the possible Russian use of nuclear weapons or that Russia will dissolve and lose control of those weapons. A frozen conflict would recall Thucydides’ Melian dialogue of 2,400 years ago that the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. Its example could also motivate smaller states worldwide to bandwagon with ruthless dictatorships rather than to balance with the United States—to the detriment of the United States.

Bakhmut, Ukraine.- In photos taken on August 10, 2023, members of the Ukrainian Armed Forces are deployed in the midst of the conflict with Russia. In the east, due to the multilevel air defense of the Ukrainian defenders, Russian aviation cannot operate over the Ukrainian positions, so the offensive continues in the direction of Bakhmut.  (Latin America News Agency/REUTERS)

Ukraine

In early June 2023, I interviewed Major General Borys Kremenetskyi, the Ukrainian Defense Attaché in Washington. He said Ukraine’s definition of victory was regaining its territorial integrity to the internationally agreed upon borders of 1991; using frozen Russian assets to pay for reconstruction in Ukraine; obtaining justice and accountability for Russian war crimes in Ukraine; and entering NATO to provide security for the future.

To achieve this first goal, Ukraine can pursue two types of military strategies; one focused on seizing territory or one focused on destroying the enemy’s army. As Ukrainian forces attack towards Crimea, the Azov Sea, and Bakhmut, it seems that they are pursuing a territorial-focused strategy. However, if one looks at Ukrainian military operations across the entire theater, we see a more complex enemy-focused strategy at work. Ukraine has concentrated its limited deep strike assets on Russian logistics, command and control, fire support, and reserve formations. By preventing fuel, ammunition, food, and replacements from reaching the front lines, Ukraine’s strategy attempts to undermine both Russian army capacity and morale. Operations near Bakhmut are a part of this strategy. Ukrainian military officers say their goal is to force the Russians to abandon the city. Russia’s loss of Bakhmut would be a minor Ukrainian tactical victory but a major psychological one and a major psychological blow to Russian morale.[12]

Counteroffensive operations have been slow, but Ukrainian forces attacking from Orikhiv are now at the first echelon of the Surovikin line. A deep penetration anywhere would cut off Russian units along the rest of the line, leaving them with a quandary of either being surrounded or having to withdraw under fire through the successive belts of their own obstacles and minefields. This could cause panic amongst poorly led and trained forces. Furthermore, Ukraine does not have to reach the coast of the Azov Sea to interdict the land bridge to Crimea. Once Ukrainian forces are within artillery range (twenty-five kilometers) of the coast, the supply lines will become untenable and Russia’s logistics for the entire Crimean Peninsula and any forces north of the Perekop Isthmus will depend on the bridge over the Kerch Straits that has already suffered two major attacks. This would mean that supplies from the Russian military center in Rostov-on-Don, which already travel 232 road miles to reach Melitipol, would have to travel 512 miles via the Kerch Strait to reach the city. This is approximately the road distance from Boston, Massachusetts to Richmond, Virginia.

Ukrainian officers admit to being in a quandary themselves. While they prepare for the war to continue into 2024 and work to conserve lives, their operations still expend hard to replace ammunition and equipment. They know that losing US support means losing the war and are under pressure for results this summer. Like the Russians, their operations are directed against the enemy in front of them, but are also designed to influence Washington. These officers do not see the counteroffensive as a single battle but as part of a phased campaign to eventually liberate Crimea. Some estimate it may require two or three separate counteroffensives to retake the peninsula.[13] How long that takes depends on their own actions, Western support, and the endurance of the Russian army.

Ukrainian officers believe Russian army endurance is based on three factors. The first is fear. Most front-line units have “blocking units” behind them, which will shoot them if they retreat. For many Russian conscripts, their only hope of survival is to wait for an opportunity to surrender. The second factor is compensation. Russia’s front-line forces are recruited or drafted from the poorest segments of Russian society. Their pay, when it comes, is higher than what they will ever earn at home. If killed in action, their families will (supposedly) receive compensation equal to almost a lifetime of their earnings. As one Russian commentator notes, it pays to die in the Russian army and such economics has turned a high probability of death into a rational choice.[14] The third factor is the effectiveness of internal Russian propaganda. As noted earlier, Russian television and the Russian Orthodox Church are conducting extensive domestic propaganda campaigns to support the war. Some Ukrainian officers report that this has been effective, especially among the poorest stratum of Russian society, which has no access to information beyond television and has never traveled abroad.[15]

President Volodymyr Zelensky visits the Donetsk region, August 2023. (president.gov.ua)

Ukraine’s strategy is to recover its territory by attriting the Russian army and making its situation seem hopeless. This is why it wants F-16s and tactical missile systems (ATACMS). These weapons support this strategy by increasing close air support for troops trying to breach fortified lines, preventing the building of additional fortifications in the rear (as happened this winter), and striking deep into Crimea to disrupt Russian logistics. ATACMS are not wanted to recover the northern coast of the Azov Sea but the southern coast of Crimea. These weapons would have a positive psychological effect for the Ukrainians, who would see them as a sign of unwavering American support, and a negative one for the Russians, who would see their logistical problems increasing.[16] This is important as psychological factors in war can be as important as any weapons system.

Currently, the three scenarios for Ukraine’s counteroffensive are for it to either break through, gnaw through, or be stalemated. Breaking through will require breaching the Surovikin line with enough reserves to exploit success. If the Ukrainians achieve this, they might exploit the resulting chaos and quickly move through the Perekop Isthmus into Crimea. This is possible, but would require a faster tempo of operations than Ukraine has been able to generate so far. More likely, Ukraine’s army can gnaw through Russian fortifications but in doing so might use most of its reserves. A slower rate of advance could allow the Russians to conduct an orderly withdrawal behind the narrow Perekop Isthmus. To cross the isthmus, Ukraine would need more engineering equipment to breach the frontal defenses, some of which date to the sixteenth century Ottoman Empire, pontoon bridges and small boats to move through the shallow Sivash lagoon (as the Red Army did in 1920 during the Russian Civil War), and landing craft and amphibious assault vehicles to conduct shore-to-shore amphibious assaults around the littoral flanks of the isthmus. This would be in addition to more artillery and air defense assets to support and protect the operation. The final scenario is a stalemate in which the front does not move forward and attrition requires an extensive rebuilding of Ukrainian reserves. This would put the ball in Washington’s court as Kyiv hopes for support into 2024 and the Kremlin hopes that a stalemate will end such support.

A view across the Kerch Strait shows smoke rising above a fuel depot near the Crimean bridge in the village of Volna in Russia’s Krasnodar region as seen from a coastline in Crimea, May 3, 2023. (REUTERS/Stringer)

Crimea: The Jewel in Two Crowns

Strategically and politically, control of Crimea will determine the winner and loser in this war. Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014 was the highpoint of Putin’s rule. Losing Crimea could well lead to events ending that rule. Most Russians supported Putin’s move in 2014 and Crimea’s occupation was a source of great national pride. The fleet anchorage in Sevastopol has both military and historical significance. Without this base, Russia cannot control the Black Sea and its history of resistance in the Crimean War and World War II makes it Russia’s cultural iconic equivalent of America’s Alamo.

Ukrainians also see Crimea in geopolitical and cultural-historic terms. The peninsula is a springboard for Russian attacks and its possession allows Russia to restrict Ukraine’s maritime trade. Furthermore, after the war crimes in other occupied areas, Ukrainians fear that if Crimea is not regained soon, Russia will destroy Ukrainian and Tatar culture on the peninsula.[17]

Ukraine has already begun planning to recover Crimea. I attended a two-day conference in Kyiv from July 18–19, 2023, sponsored by several non-governmental organizations. The conference was attended by government officials and private individuals who discussed plans for the peninsula and Black Sea security once the war has ended. The general tone of the conference was that Crimea will be recovered and now is the time to start planning to reintegrate it into Ukraine. If the conflict is a holy war for Ukraine, and some Ukrainians on the street use that expression, then Crimea is their Jerusalem that “next year” they wish to be in.

Another reason why Crimea figures strongly in Ukrainian post-war planning is because many Ukrainians consider an unambiguous Russian defeat, including the loss of Crimea, as the key to ending Russian imperialism. Some conference attendees recalled how defeat and occupation in World War II cured Germany and Japan of fascism, imperialism, and militarism. Since Russia’s possession of nuclear weapons and sheer size preclude occupation, they believe that only if Russia loses Crimea, the jewel in her imperial crown, and it stays lost with Ukraine’s accession into NATO, might it reconsider its imperial nature. Ukrainians also believe that a war which ends with Russia still in possession of Crimea, is a war that guarantees that imperialism as a major feature of Russian foreign policy and national identity will continue. It is for Crimea, far more than the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, that Ukrainians are willing to sacrifice for a war lasting years. They also realize that the Russians might be willing to do the same.[18]

US Policy Considerations and Opportunities

US foreign policy makers need to decide for what goals and how long America intends to support Ukraine against Russia. While President Joe Biden states that the country will support Ukraine “for as long as it takes,” he has yet to articulate the exact foreign policy goals he hopes to achieve by this. After a year and a half of war, the Biden Administration is past the need for strategic ambiguity and should explain to the American people, its allies, and the Ukrainians what they can expect and make the same clear to the Kremlin. As one senior Ukrainian military official commented, “everyone says they want Ukraine to win, but no one is saying that they want Russia to lose.”

Ukraine cannot win without Russia losing; but fears of a Russian collapse or the possible use of nuclear weapons seem to drive US policy more than considerations of the opportunities that a Ukrainian victory could bring. It is often cited that the Chinese language character for the word crisis is the combination of the brush strokes for the words danger and opportunity. This combination applies to America’s Ukrainian policy. There is no way the United States can overcome the dangers inherent in this war without some element of risk and danger in its response. However, American officials should also recognize opportunities that could strengthen US security if they take advantage of them and are not deterred by their fears.

One opportunity is a Russian defeat that can serve both as a brake against further Kremlin aggression and as a catalyst for Russia to possibly change her imperial identity. Another opportunity is the chance to strengthen NATO’s conventional forces and geographic position to give it an overwhelming advantage against any possible future Russian aggression. For that to happen, Ukraine must enter the alliance.

Russian military losses in Ukraine likely preclude conventional aggression against NATO members bordering Russia for five years or more. The alliance has benefited greatly from Ukraine’s sacrifices considering that just a few years earlier many believed that NATO could not prevent Russia from seizing the Baltic states. Now many believe that defeating Russian aggression in Ukraine may deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan. Furthermore, by lessening the conventional threat to the Baltics, the United States can concentrate more against threats in the Indo-Pacific region.

Unfortunately, history shows that after every defeat, Russia rebuilds its military and regains its imperial impulses. That has been Russia’s political nature for centuries and will remain so until forced to change. A polity’s national identity is the result of how it interprets its history.[19] Russia interprets its history as a great power with a messianic mission—be it as the leader of the Communist movement or as a Third Rome. As noted earlier regarding Germany and Japan, national identity usually changes only after major disasters. Russia’s loss of Crimea could be such a disaster. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia has used history and symbolism to reaffirm Russia’s imperial identity, and ignore neighbors’ different interpretations of the past. However, an imperial national identity for Russia is less credible if Ukraine remains independent. Putin is using war to deny Ukraine’s nationhood. Ukrainians are defending themselves to affirm it.

If Russia’s response to defeat in Ukraine and the loss of its ill-gotten gains in Crimea is revanche and not reform, then the need for Ukraine in NATO becomes even more imperative. Just as NATO enlargement did not cause the war, Ukraine’s accession into NATO will not be the cause of, but solution to, future Russian imperialism and irredentism. With Ukraine in NATO, there is no way Russia can succeed with future conventional aggression against the alliance. Ukraine would provide the alliance with its largest and most combat-experienced military besides the United States. By making Ukraine the eastern edge of Europe, Russian aggression westward is blocked. The recent accession of Finland into the alliance—and the prospect of Sweden formally joining NATO very soon—blocks Russian aggression from the Arctic Circle to the Baltic Sea, which is now a NATO lake. Ukrainian membership in the alliance would make the Black Sea a NATO lake, no longer vulnerable to Russian military and economic pressure. Any latent Russian imperialism will have to be directed into the Caucasus, where it will face Turkish opposition, or Central Asia, where China has already guaranteed Kazakhstan’s territorial integrity.[20] Ukraine in NATO will stabilize Europe to a point where it can be defended mostly by European ground forces and US air and air defense forces; the rest of US power can then concentrate on other threats.

If the United States pursues this policy, then the question to be addressed is not how to deal with Russian decline but how to ensure Ukrainian success—militarily, and more importantly, politically. Despite its incredible courage, problems of corruption, poor governance, press freedoms, and other issues remain. Ukrainians themselves recognize this. When I asked a pensioner if Ukraine had earned NATO membership, he replied emphatically, “The simple people YES! The bosses NO; they are all still thieves!”[21] Other Ukrainians take a more nuanced view recognizing the flaws in their society but believing that news about corruption shows a system trying to deal with the problem.

This raises the question, is Ukraine “ready” for NATO membership?

Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky and Danish Prime Mette Frederiksen sat in the cockpit of an F-16 fighter jet during a trip to Skrydstrup Airbase, in Denmark, on Sunday August 20, 2023. (president.gov.ua)

Ukraine is probably still far away from the NATO “ideal” that membership requires; but is it any further away than Romania, Montenegro, or even Poland were when they were admitted? Portugal is a founding member of NATO, even though in 1949 it was a military dictatorship, because the alliance needed access to the Azores to protect the Atlantic sea-lanes in case of war with the Soviet Union. Certainly, Ukraine’s democratic drawbacks are far less than those of Salazar’s Portugal. Ukraine is in transition from a proto-Soviet society to a Western one, but the West is still not fully ready to accept it. Paradoxically, Russia has rejected the West, but the West seems to refuse to accept its rejection.

US policy should be to integrate Ukraine politically and economically into the West while the country reforms and builds the institutions needed to accomplish this. Change can come in wartime. At the height of the American Civil War, Congress passed the Pacific Railway Act (1862) and the Homestead Act (1863), which set the stage for vigorous growth once the war ended. The challenge to “win the peace” will be as difficult as the challenge to win the war, but just as essential.

One question about winning the peace is can other alternatives, such as the proposed Israel or South Korea models, suffice instead of NATO membership?

In short, no. Neither model can prevent war from breaking out again. As Eliot Cohen noted in a recent Atlantic article, the “Israel model,” wherein the United States guaranteed Israel’s ability to counter and defeat any credible conventional military threat, is a dubious analogy for Ukraine and a bad idea. He noted that this policy did not arise until after Israel had defeated the Arab states in four conventional wars and had developed nuclear weapons. Ukraine’s postwar demography and economy cannot put it in the same position as Israel relative to its enemies and Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons based, in part, on US security assurances.[22]

The South Korea model, an armistice along the current front line,[23] means a frozen conflict until one side regains enough strength to start fighting again. It is Russia’s preferred solution, has been rejected by Ukraine, and would create an unstable situation on the continent like a permanently smoldering fuse next to a powder keg. Furthermore, proponents of this option fail to recognize that what has kept South Korea safe for decades was not an armistice but the stationing there of tens of thousands of US soldiers and at one time nuclear weapons.

The final question is what if Russia breaks apart and we face the specter of loose nuclear weapons and another Russian Civil War?

Russia just might break apart. As noted in a previous FPRI paper, the loss of Crimea could lead to Putin’s downfall, political violence including even civil war, and the possible disintegration of parts of the Russian Federation.[24] The United States must prepare for this possibility and have plans to deal with the threats posed to Russia’s nuclear inventory just as we had to during the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Empires end and there is nothing observers can do about it if the empire’s rulers cannot. Despite the dangers, the end of the Russian empire would mean the end of Russian imperialism, which would be beneficial for long term stability in Europe and the geopolitical position of the United States.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a non-partisan organization that seeks to publish well-argued, policy-oriented articles on American foreign policy and national security priorities.

[1] Wasielewski, Philip, “The Evolving Political-Military Aims in the War in Ukraine After 100 Days,” Foreign Policy Research Institute, June 9, 2022, https://www.fpri.org/article/2022/06/the-evolving-political-military-aims-in-the-war-in-ukraine-after-100-days/.

[2] Author’s interview, July 17, 2023, Ukraine.

[3] Tharoor, Ishaan, “Putin wanted to redeem Russia’s history. He’s now haunted by it,” Washington Post, June 27, 2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/06/27/putin-history-1917-bolshevik-czar-revolution-crisis/.

[4] See Financial Times, “The Kremlin’s ‘Holy War’ against Ukraine,” April 19, 2022, https://www.ft.com/content/01cd44a4-a70a-4019-b4d9-df5d5a4bbd6e; Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, “Russian Patriarch Kirill Says Dying In Ukraine ‘Washes Away All Sins,’” September 26, 2022, https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-patriarch-kirill-dying-ukraine-sins/32052380.html; “Russia Fighting ‘Sacred’ Battle Against Satan, Medvedev Says,” November 4, 2022, https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-holy-war-satan-medvedev/32115565.html; Ellie Cook, “Russian State TV Hosts Says Russia Entering ‘Holy War Mode,’” Newsweek, January 22, 2023, https://www.newsweek.com/russian-state-television-vladimir-solovyov-ukraine-holy-war-1775589.

[5] Brennan, David, “Putin Tightens Mobilization Noose with Tenfold Hike in Draft-Dodging Fines,” Newsweek, August 1, 2023, https://www.newsweek.com/putin-mobilization-tenfold-hike-draft-dodging-fines-conscription-ukraine-reserves-1816658; Pierre Briancon, “The IMF’s outlook on Russia is too rosy to be true,” Reuters, February 10, 2023, https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/imfs-outlook-russia-is-too-rosy-to-be-true-2023-02-10.

[6] Author’s interview, July 19, 2023, Ukraine.

[7] Author’s interview, July 19, 2023, Ukraine.

[8] Author’s interview, July 20, 2023, Ukraine.

[9] Author’s interview, July 20, 2023, Ukraine.

[10] Andrew Kramer and Steven Erlanger, “Russia Lays Out Demands for a Sweeping New Security Deal With NATO,” New York Times, December 17, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/17/world/europe/russia-nato-security-deal.html; Gabrielle Tetrault-Farber and Tom Balmworth, “Russia demands NATO roll back from East Europe and stay out of Ukraine,” Reuters, December 17, 2021, https://www.reuters.com/world/russia-unveils-security-guarantees-says-western-response-not-encouraging-2021-12-17/.

[11] Lenta.ru, “Это чревато катастрофическими иоследствиями” Сергей Лавров – о конфликте с НАТО и рисках применения ядерного оружия [“This is fraught with catastrophic consequences” Sergey Lavrov on conflict with NATO and the risks of using nuclear weapons], July 12, 2023, https://lenta.ru/articles/2023/07/13/lavrov/.

[12] Author’s interviews, July 17-18, 2023, Ukraine.

[13] Author’s interviews, July 17-21, 2023, Ukraine.

[14] Vladislav Inozemstev, “Putin’s Deathonomics,” Riddle Russia, July 11, 2023, https://ridl.io/putin-s-deathonomics/.

[15] Author’s interviews, July 17–18, 2023, Ukraine.

[16] Author’s interview, July 18, 2023, Ukraine.

[17] Author’s interviews, July 19, 2023, Ukraine.

[18] Author’s interviews, July 19, 2023, Ukraine.

[19] Ilya Prizel, National Identity and Foreign Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 14.

[20] Lily Kuo, “China’s Xi Visits Central Asia Ahead of Expected Meeting with Putin,” Washington Post, September 14, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/14/china-xi-putin-meeting-kazakhstan-uzbekistan/.

[21] Author’s interview, July 16, 2023, Ukraine.

[22] Eliot Cohen, “The ‘Israel Model’ Won’t Work for Ukraine,” The Atlantic, July 13, 2023, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/07/israel-model-ukraine/674683/.

[23] Carter Malkasian, “The Korea Model: Why an Armistice Offers the Best Hope for Peace in Ukraine,” Foreign Affairs, June 20, 2023, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/korean-war-diplomacy-armistice-nato.

[24] Philip Wasielewski, “Will Russia Survive Until 2084?”, Foreign Policy Research Institute, December 20, 2022, https://www.fpri.org/article/2022/12/will-russia-survive-until-2084/.

9. Let Ukraine Direct Its Own Counteroffensive by Jack Keane

Conclusion:

It is a vital national-security interest for the U.S. that Ukraine liberate its land and its people from Russian aggression. America should stop the criticism about what Ukraine is doing and focus instead on helping Ukraine achieve our common aims as rapidly as possible. That would be sound strategy.

Let Ukraine Direct Its Own Counteroffensive

American officers chirping from the sidelines have never done what Kyiv’s forces are trying to do.

By Jack Keane

Aug. 27, 2023 5:08 pm ET

https://www.wsj.com/articles/let-ukraine-direct-its-own-counteroffensive-russia-war-weapons-military-kyiv-bd360796?mod=opinion_lead_pos6&utm

Volodymyr Zelensky in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, Aug. 15. PHOTO: PRESIDENTIAL OFFICE OF UKRAINE/ZUMA PRESS

U.S. military personnel are voicing their frustrations over the way Ukraine is conducting its counteroffensive. This is alarming. American officers appear to have unrealistic expectations of what a single counteroffensive operation can achieve. The U.S. should be focused on helping Ukraine fight the war the way it wants to fight, not chirping from the sidelines.

American military leadership wants Ukraine to concentrate the forces the West has equipped and trained for the counteroffensive on a single sector in western Zaporizhia oblast, where the goal would be to break through Russian lines rapidly and seize the city of Melitopol. American officials are reportedly irritated that Ukraine has kept large numbers of forces in its east, particularly around the town of Bakhmut, and that Ukraine has been pursuing multiple offensive thrusts within Zaporizhia oblast itself rather than focusing on only one.

No one in the American military today has designed large-scale mechanized operations against a serious and capable enemy that is employing a comprehensive defense. The last time was the Metz campaign in France in 1944, led by Gen. George S. Patton. The massed attack toward Melitopol that some are demanding is the most obvious thing Ukraine could do and would concentrate Ukraine’s offensive combat power on a drive down the shortest road to the sea. This approach seems appealing and militarily sound.

The trouble is that the Russians also had the same thought. They deployed the strongest of their remaining defending forces on this axis. They dug deep, extensive trench lines and covered the earth in mines. Their best pilots flying their most advanced attack helicopters are situated in this area ready for the Ukrainian attack. They’ve been fortifying Melitopol and the next town to the north, Tokmak, for a year. This shortest road to the sea is also the best-prepared part of the Russian defenses in the theater.

The Ukrainians have actually made a priority of this route and have recently made important gains. But they have also been attacking further east in Zaporizhia oblast and have made gains there as well. The effort that seems to aggravate American officials most of all, however, has been the Ukrainian push to recapture the city of Bakhmut, which the Wagner Group seized at tremendous cost this spring. U.S. military experts appear to want the Ukrainians to hold on all other fronts and focus on a single thrust toward Melitopol.

Such advice is military malpractice. Well-designed mechanized campaigns almost always advance on multiple axes rather than one. That is what American-led coalitions did against Iraq in 1991 and 2003. It’s how the Americans, Germans and Soviets fought in World War II. The reason is simple: Advancing along a single axis allows the defender to concentrate fully on stopping that one advance. In this case, the Russians would almost certainly have moved forces from other parts of the theater as rapidly as they could to stop the Ukrainian drive on Melitopol.

The Russians have redeployed forces to Zaporizhia. They haven’t sent more reinforcements, in part because Ukrainian attacks have pinned them all along the line. The much-condemned Ukrainian counteroffensive around Bakhmut has drawn elements of multiple Russian airborne divisions and separate brigades to hold the line there. Those units had been fighting in Luhansk and Kharkiv oblasts and would have been available to reinforce the Melitopol axis.

Now they are being ground down around Bakhmut because the Ukrainians keep pushing on a city that the Russians aren’t prepared to lose. The Ukrainian attack further east in Zaporizhia has also pinned Russian forces on that sector that could otherwise have shifted to the west. Similar smaller-scale Ukrainian attacks elsewhere along the line have had the same effect. Ukrainian pressure along the line has deprived the Russians of almost any meaningful reserve with which to contest a major Ukrainian breakthrough.

The seizure of Melitopol on its own can’t win the war for Ukraine. The demands that Ukraine focus everything on that drive, combined with warnings that the West won’t restock Ukraine for future operations, suggest that at least some of those criticizing the Ukrainian offensive aren’t serious about helping Ukraine liberate all its territory. If that is the case, and if the Pentagon’s position is that it doesn’t expect Ukraine to liberate its people, it would be better to say so clearly than to make oblique and inaccurate attacks on the way Ukraine is fighting.

It is a vital national-security interest for the U.S. that Ukraine liberate its land and its people from Russian aggression. America should stop the criticism about what Ukraine is doing and focus instead on helping Ukraine achieve our common aims as rapidly as possible. That would be sound strategy.

Mr. Keane, a retired four-star general, was the Army’s vice chief of staff and is chairman of the Institute for the Study of War.

10. New Friends Changed My Mind About Ukraine

Excerpts:

Ukraine has become a partisan issue. Before my trip, I was receptive to arguments from nationalists who think we should scale back aid to Ukraine. But not now. It isn’t only Ukraine counting on us to have their backs.

I don’t know the best way to confront Russia. But I do know that now, when I think about Russia and Ukraine, I’m not focused on Burisma, Hunter Biden or Ukrainian oligarchs. I worry more about my new friends living in Vladimir Putin’s shadow.

New Friends Changed My Mind About Ukraine

A visit to Finland and the Baltic states helped me appreciate the Russian threat.

By Dave Seminara

Aug. 28, 2023 5:42 pm ET

https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-friends-changed-my-mind-about-ukraine-baltic-states-tourism-visas-russia-8fb80092?utm

Protesters outside the Russian embassy in Tallinn, Estonia. PHOTO: DAVE SEMINARA

Pekka Veteläinen and Anna Saarela are tough Finns who heat their home with firewood and make a living off Russian bears. They built five bear-viewing cabins in the taiga, roughly half a mile from the border and Russia’s Paanajärvi National Park—land that was part of Finland before World War II. Business is slow this year because of the Ukraine war, they told me, as we watched half a dozen massive brown bears scavenge in the lake. Pekka used to believe Finland should remain neutral. “But our opinion about NATO changed overnight with the invasion,” he said.

My family spent a month this summer traveling in Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Everywhere we went, from the Arctic Circle to the Curonian Spit, pro-Ukraine and anti-Russian sentiment was rampant. In Cēsis, Latvia, our host, Zigmunds Rutkovskis, proudly told us that his daughter was learning every important language, “but not Russian.” At the local tennis club, head pro Valdis Libietis told us the club had taken in a Ukrainian soldier who lost his leg in the war and was now living above the clubhouse. “It’s our duty to help,” he said.

From Helsinki to Vilnius, Ukrainian flags are ubiquitous. In Riga, Latvia’s capital, they’re on every bus and tram car. Since the war, tensions between the country’s ethnic Russian minority and its Latvian majority have bubbled over. Lawmakers passed a law this year whereby the vehicles of drunk drivers are now shipped to Ukraine for use by the military and hospitals. Latvia’s Parliament last year amended the country’s immigration law to require Russian citizens living in the country to pass a Latvian language test.

In Jaunpils, Latvia, where you can stay in a 700-year-old castle at bargain prices, a young woman operating a medieval-games business told us that a pro-Russian singer was booted out of the country’s annual song competition. Since the war, she said, she and many other Latvians have refused to speak Russian. “When we hear it, we just shrug and pretend like we can’t understand them,” she said.

In Vilnius, our guide, Lina, showed us the city’s stunning Old Town and proudly told us that her nation of fewer than three million people raised €5 million ($5.4 million) in three days to buy an advanced military drone for Ukraine. “We understand what the Ukrainians are going through better than anyone,” she said. We saw evidence of Lithuania’s resolve at the Hill of Crosses, a pilgrimage site where believers have left hundreds of thousands of crosses. The Soviets bulldozed the site in 1961, 1973 and 1975—burning thousands of wooden crosses and confiscating metal ones for scrap. Many people were arrested, but each time the Soviets removed the crosses, more appeared until the Soviets eventually gave up. Perhaps this is a lesson for us today as we deal with Russian aggression: The war in Ukraine must be won on the battlefield, but also through small acts of resistance.

Each country we visited has barred Russian tourists. Tourism is already down in the region because of the war, but the countries believe it’s worth the economic pain to send a message to the Kremlin. Only two others have followed their lead: Poland and the Czech Republic. Meanwhile a host of other countries are actively courting Russian tourists. Iran and Cuba recently signed tourism pacts with Russia. Sri Lanka, Morocco and Thailand plan to launch direct flights there. India, Myanmar and Oman recently held meetings with Russia to discuss tourism.

Meantime Americans can still trade with and visit countries confronting Russian tyranny or those enabling it. The U.S. Embassy in Moscow no longer offers nondiplomatic visas—for reasons unrelated to the war. Since the invasion, however, the U.S. has issued more than 60,000 tourist visas to Russian citizens. Perhaps we should ban Russian tourists who aren’t coming to visit an American citizen or do business here.

Ukraine has become a partisan issue. Before my trip, I was receptive to arguments from nationalists who think we should scale back aid to Ukraine. But not now. It isn’t only Ukraine counting on us to have their backs.

I don’t know the best way to confront Russia. But I do know that now, when I think about Russia and Ukraine, I’m not focused on Burisma, Hunter Biden or Ukrainian oligarchs. I worry more about my new friends living in Vladimir Putin’s shadow.

Mr. Seminara is a former diplomat and author of “Mad Travelers: A Tale of Wanderlust, Greed & the Quest to Reach the Ends of the Earth.”

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Journal Editorial Report: GOP candidates square off in first primary debate and clash over aid to Ukraine. Image: Win McNamee/Getty Images

Copyright ©2023 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Appeared in the August 29, 2023, print edition as 'New Friends Changed My Mind About Ukraine'.

11. Will Politicians Ban Their Best Way of Reaching Young Voters?

I do not offer this from a partisan perspective. Obviously elections are the most important part of democracy in the US and around the world. This medium or method of communication or information dissemination appears to be a potential game changer for all things related to influence for the younger generations. If Tok Tok is banned I am sure something will replace it (Reels on Facebook?). 

As an aside I continue to see commercials on cable news networks about the positive impact TikTok has had on people's lives to paint TikTok as a "public good."

This Is an interesting anecdote.

Excerpts:

Blink and you might have missed it: The future of political persuasion, slipped into a mostly apolitical piece of online content — an innovation that could be a game-changer for politics and, by tapping into the votes of those most likely to sit out elections otherwise, democracy itself.

“Thao came up with the most interesting ideas,” says Linh Nguyen, 35 and no relation.

Linh, who lives in Houston, is executive director of Represent Us Now (a.k.a. RUN) AAPI, a left-of-center nonprofit founded in 2021 by Chloe Bennet, an activist and actress who appeared in Marvel’s “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” and Funny or Die managing director Brad Jenkins, a veteran of the Obama White House’s Office of Public Engagement. The pair founded the group to funnel the growing cultural and political might of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the United States into political power capable of swinging elections. Linh started at the group as executive director in 2022, shortly after running outreach efforts to Asian American voters in the Georgia Senate elections on behalf of the coordinated Democratic campaigns of Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, who were both ultimately elected.

In the waning days of the 2022 election, RUN AAPI and its voter-turnout push, called “Give a F*ck About Midterms,” got a sudden influx of funding, $75,000 that Linh and her colleagues decided to pour into the video app TikTok. They turned to five previously non-political creators with ties to key swing states, including Thao, and who had a combined reach of 6.7 million viewers.

A RUN AAPI influencer coordinator found Thao, whose posts are often related to Vietnamese identity, on TikTok shortly before election day while scrolling online, and, on an intro call, pitched her on the mission. The coordinator wanted to tap into the creativity of young Asian Americans to boost in that cohort a shared sense of political participation, emphasizing that even if they’re rightly dismayed by the state of American politics, they have the opportunity to make outsized use of their political power by voting in often-overlooked non-presidential year elections. Linh recalls Thao as especially receptive: She had been bothered by what she saw as the political apathy of her peers.

“She was so sweet, so down, and just really understood it,” says Linh — including what her audience would respond to. And Thao, says Linh, was given particular creative freedom: “She pitched just a ton of different ideas. By that time, as much as we wanted to maintain and honor a feedback protocol, to make sure that we were being supportive with how the content was being created” — including fact-checking to be sure influencers were given out accurate voting information — “it was just so close to Election Day, and Thao just ran with it.” Thao posted twice for RUN AAPI; the creators, says the organization, were paid between $2,500 and $5,000 for their participation.

What Linh knew was that TikTok was a particularly powerful channel for reaching her target audience. The 150 million TikTok users in the United States skew younger and more diverse than the general population — which represents, to Linh and to other political strategists, a big opportunity to get through to the most hard-to-reach voters.

Will Politicians Ban Their Best Way of Reaching Young Voters?

TikTok is proving to be potentially game-changing for connecting with young voters of color. It also might not be around for long.

Inside the TikTok Industrial Complex That Could Revolutionize Campaigns

Politico · by Nancy Scola

The app is proving to be potentially game-changing for connecting with young voters of color. It also might not be around for long.

Illustration by Rafael Garcia for POLITICO

By Nancy Scola

08/25/2023 04:30 AM EDT

, a contributing writer at Politico Magazine, is a journalist based in Washington whose work examines the complicated intersections of technology and society.

It’s just days before the 2022 midterm election that has professional Democrats fretting about a “red wave,” and though she’s new to politics, Thao Nguyen is confidently nailing all of her marks. The Atlanta-based college student is filming in her mom’s Honda while back home visiting in Michigan, the sort of caught-in-the-middle-of-real-life setting that TikTok seems to eat up. Plus the natural light does wonders for the skin.

Nguyen — known as @_nguyenthaoo to her 334,000 followers — is making the latest in her series of #redflags videos, listing the behavior she considers warning signs in a person. One, openly hating on certain fast-food side items: “You know McDonald’s French fries hit different.” Two, only listening to one type of music: “What’s the point of being friends with you if don’t even know, like, old Disney pop songs?” And lastly, being uninterested in politics or voting: “Like, at your big age, you don’t really care about what’s going on around you? It doesn’t make any sense.”

Blink and you might have missed it: The future of political persuasion, slipped into a mostly apolitical piece of online content — an innovation that could be a game-changer for politics and, by tapping into the votes of those most likely to sit out elections otherwise, democracy itself.

“Thao came up with the most interesting ideas,” says Linh Nguyen, 35 and no relation.

Linh, who lives in Houston, is executive director of Represent Us Now (a.k.a. RUN) AAPI, a left-of-center nonprofit founded in 2021 by Chloe Bennet, an activist and actress who appeared in Marvel’s “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” and Funny or Die managing director Brad Jenkins, a veteran of the Obama White House’s Office of Public Engagement. The pair founded the group to funnel the growing cultural and political might of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the United States into political power capable of swinging elections. Linh started at the group as executive director in 2022, shortly after running outreach efforts to Asian American voters in the Georgia Senate elections on behalf of the coordinated Democratic campaigns of Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, who were both ultimately elected.

In the waning days of the 2022 election, RUN AAPI and its voter-turnout push, called “Give a F*ck About Midterms,” got a sudden influx of funding, $75,000 that Linh and her colleagues decided to pour into the video app TikTok. They turned to five previously non-political creators with ties to key swing states, including Thao, and who had a combined reach of 6.7 million viewers.

A RUN AAPI influencer coordinator found Thao, whose posts are often related to Vietnamese identity, on TikTok shortly before election day while scrolling online, and, on an intro call, pitched her on the mission. The coordinator wanted to tap into the creativity of young Asian Americans to boost in that cohort a shared sense of political participation, emphasizing that even if they’re rightly dismayed by the state of American politics, they have the opportunity to make outsized use of their political power by voting in often-overlooked non-presidential year elections. Linh recalls Thao as especially receptive: She had been bothered by what she saw as the political apathy of her peers.

“She was so sweet, so down, and just really understood it,” says Linh — including what her audience would respond to. And Thao, says Linh, was given particular creative freedom: “She pitched just a ton of different ideas. By that time, as much as we wanted to maintain and honor a feedback protocol, to make sure that we were being supportive with how the content was being created” — including fact-checking to be sure influencers were given out accurate voting information — “it was just so close to Election Day, and Thao just ran with it.” Thao posted twice for RUN AAPI; the creators, says the organization, were paid between $2,500 and $5,000 for their participation.

What Linh knew was that TikTok was a particularly powerful channel for reaching her target audience. The 150 million TikTok users in the United States skew younger and more diverse than the general population — which represents, to Linh and to other political strategists, a big opportunity to get through to the most hard-to-reach voters.

Linh is not alone in trying to meet these voters where they are. In interviews with nearly two dozen digital consultants, political aides and voter mobilization experts, mostly but not exclusively Democrats, sources took me inside the quietly booming campaign ecosystem that is spreading on the app and that has become crucially important in connecting with voters of color. These strategists aren’t turning to TikTok just for brand-building, messaging and mobilizing on behalf of candidates and causes, but for establishing trust and combatting disinformation, which have proven to be particular challenges in connecting with these voters in recent years.

But TikTok is also in serious jeopardy. Many critics fear that the Chinese Communist Party has unacceptable influence over TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, that it could use to, say, extract Americans’ data from the app or tweak its powerful algorithm to negatively influence public opinion. And many in Washington on both sides of the aisle find TikTok’s defense — for example, CEO Shou Zi Chew testified before the House of Representatives in March that “We do not promote or remove content at the request of the Chinese government” — unconvincing. “Republicans ain’t got no swag,” Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) has said, offering his explanation for why the GOP overwhelmingly backs restrictions on TikTok. But Republicans’ stance against the app also likely has to do with the party’s hardended posture towards China since the presidency of Donald Trump, who frequently condemned the country.

The app has been banned on official devices — that is, on government-owned computers and mobile phones — in nearly three dozen states, as well as, with some exceptions, federally under a bill signed by President Joe Biden on Dec. 30 of last year. There have been pushes in Congress to ban TikTok outright, for everyone, and the Biden administration has for years been reviewing whether TikTok should be forced to sell itself to an American firm or face prohibition.

If TikTok is banned, young people won’t just be losing out on a place to participate in the latest viral dance challenge, share anthropological memes about the ways we live today (see, “beige flags”) or learn life hacks like #tenminuterecipes. Both political parties will be losing out on a chance to connect with voters who are notoriously hard to turn out — and whose influence in politics is already hamstrung by restrictive voting rules and gerrymandering, which have been shown to have a disparate impact on minority voters.

Since its launch in 2016, “the versatility, the trust of this platform has grown exponentially,” says Linh Nguyen. “Understanding the power and growth of TikTok, it’s not even an emerging platform anymore. It’s the platform for younger generations.”

Jamaal Bowman didn’t think much of TikTok when he became a member of Congress in the winter of 2021. But Bowman, a New York Democrat representing parts of the Bronx and Westchester County, was soon persuaded to try the app by his then-22-year-old press secretary-slash-digital director, a University of Toronto grad named Emma Simon. Simon, who was otherwise trying to appease the TikTok algorithm with a steady diet of news clips, convinced Bowman to try posting updates on California Republican Kevin McCarthy’s attempt to be elected the next speaker of the House in the winter of 2023. Bowman embraced the role of political analyst; in one TikTok video, on the 12th vote, he cracked open a bag of Act II microwave popcorn in the cloakroom just off the House floor. On the 14th and penultimate vote, he offered a blow-by-blow of McCarthy’s chaotic struggle to get votes, in confessional-style talking straight into the camera, “It’s like they personally just don’t like this guy.” The video pulled in nearly 30,000 views and praise for giving viewers a behind-the-scenes look at Congress. Went one comment, “This is like when your cousin updates you on the big family fight.”

Bowman was hooked.

TikTok, says Bowman’s office (which would only speak without attribution to discuss the inner workings of his shop), is a good match for the 47-year-old congressman’s personality — what he calls his “middle-school principal energy,” his frequent references to hip-hop super group WuTang Clan, the “peace and love” with which he signs off of his clips — than other platforms. It’s also a safer space than X, the website formerly known as Twitter, where Bowman, a Black man and member of the so-called Squad, is often greeted with derision — “Such a drama queen!!!,” goes one recent comment — if not vitriol — “You’re just a race hustling court jester,” goes another. Comments on his TikTok clips run more along the lines of “This man has my heart.” A March video clip of Bowman saying at a House committee hearing, “Why can’t we leave trans people alone?” got just 103,000 views on X, but two million on TikTok.

Bowman’s 216,000-follower TikTok account is a best-in-show example of what the app can do for politicians: recognition and brand-building — Bowman makes the young Black and brown Americans like the ones he led as a school principal in the Bronx a centerpiece of his work — but, crucially, not fundraising or formal advertising.

That’s because TikTok has tried to sell itself as a place for everything but politics. Since 2019, the company has banned paid political advertising on the site (“the nature of paid political ads is not something we believe fits the TikTok platform experience,” TikTok’s then vice president of global business solutions Blake Chandlee said at the time the restrictions were imposed), a policy critics say is full of loopholes and is regularly abused but that reflects the firm’s belief that it’s better off without the political headaches that have plagued Facebook and other platforms.

Still, campaign consultants, particularly Democrats, have been watching candidates like Bowman take off on TikTok — and are determined to emulate their success on a bigger scale while not running afoul of TikTok’s restrictions on political speech. RUN AAPI, for its part, argues that their work is focused on increasing civic engagement, not explicit political advocacy, and thus colors within the lines of TikTok’s restrictions; TikTok did not respond to requests to clarify its political content rules.

BlueLabs Analytics is a Washington, D.C.-based firm that does predictive modeling of target audiences for progressive groups like Democratic Congressional Campaign, American Bridge and the League of Conservation Voters. Central to the model is a “contactability score” — in other words, a measure of the effectiveness of reaching a would-be supporter through one channel or another. In the last few years, BlueLabs has begun including TikTok in that research as a medium of interest, even though, at the moment, TikTok’s ban on political ads means that BlueLabs does not provide modeling for its political clients to use on the platform.

BlueLabs’ data paints TikTok as both a challenge and opportunity. According to previously unpublished BlueLabs data shared with POLITICO Magazine for this story, TikTok users are, it turns out, less politically engaged than users of other social media platforms, even controlling for age. For example, while some 65 percent of the control group knew that Republicans now hold a majority in the House of Representatives, only 51 percent of frequent TikTok users did. What’s more, while 32 percent of the control group under the age of 30 voted in the 2022 midterm election, only 26 percent of frequent TikTok users did.

I ask Ali Collins, BlueLabs’ director of political strategy and advocacy, if that data suggests the TikTok audience is, politically speaking, beyond reach. Collins suggests it’s the opposite: It’s a way into an audience that could be turned into voters, if an effort is actually made to engage them. “They’re spending less time on traditional modes of communication where a lot of political discussion happens, such as cable or broadcast TV,” she says. But, says Collins, it’s not a lost cause: “It’s just that we need to figure out how to reach them in an effective way.”

The political habits of TikTok users are an exaggerated version of those of the group most of them are coming from. Young people are typically less politically engaged: In 2022, people ages 18 to 29 voted at a rate of 31 percent, compared to nearly 47 percent of people 30 to 44, and 48 percent of people 45 to 64, according to Census data analyzed by the Brookings Institution. And those numbers dip further among young people of color: Some 26 percent of young Black Americans and 24 percent of young Hispanic Americans voted last cycle, compared to 35 percent of their white counterparts. Across age groups, Asian Americans are less likely to vote than white Americans. (Pollsters say there’s insufficient data on Asian American voting habits to break down across age groups.)

And TikTok, say experts, can help reach and motivate more of these voters. Hilary Nachem Loewenstein, managing director of the left-of-center public affairs and communications firm Bully Pulpit Interactive, says a best practice is to lean into using TikTok as a testing ground for what works. “What is interesting about TikTok is the ability to use the algorithm to find your audience — to be able to put out five or 10 or 20 messages, and to better understand what is resonating, because the algorithm is very good at determining what people are interested in.”

Often, though, that isn’t politicians themselves at all.

“A bit of a new Hollywood era,” says Lowenstein, referring to TikTok users often called, sometimes with a bit of derision, “influencers,” a term that more generously refers to the people who other people listen to on the app. For politicians who might not themselves be fodder for TikTok traction, there’s another way: borrowing the reach of others.

It’s likely a space in which TikTok will expand — tapping into influencers who can help carry political messages on a platform largely allergic to them, going the way of corporate brand marketing, which is turning more towards seemingly organic influencer-driven content rather than old-school advertising in a bid to capture Americans’ enormously fractured attention.

Vickie Segar, founder at Village Marketing, a New York City-based “influencer-led creative agency,” notes that the Biden campaign in 2020 recruited unpaid influencers on TikTok (thus exempting them from the app’s ban on paid political ads) during the country’s debate over Black Lives Matter to explore Biden’s record on race — and the doubts some Black Americans had about where a President Biden would stand on everything from policing to economy opportunity. It was, the thinking went, more powerful than simply having Biden tackle the topics without intermediaries. “If you allow an influencer or creator to be able to ask the questions they want, which we did,” says Segar, “they usually ask the questions their community wants to ask, in the way their community wants to ask them.”

In 2019, Alex Kronman realized that his company Flytedesk, which he had started six years earlier to sell advertising space on college campuses, could take on a new opportunity: influencers on Instagram and TikTok.

Today, as part of its “Campus Influencers” program launched in February of 2020, Flytedesk partners with the business staff of campus news organizations and others on campus, paying those students a fee between $50 and $300 to identify would-be student influencers with outsized reach on campus, such as student-athletes, sorority leaders and heads of Black student unions.

Once harvested, those names go into a database made accessible to brands and organizations looking for micro-influencers on Instagram and TikTok. If paired with the campaign, those content creators are given a brief on what the organization is looking for and are paid at least $50 per post with less than 10,000 followers, and at least $100 with more.

In 2020, the nonpartisan voter turnout group VoteAmerica tapped some 700 influencers through the Flytedesk system, with a focus on students at some of the country’s hundred-plus historically Black colleges and universities. (VoteAmerica is non-partisan non-profit, and sees its work, like Run AAPI, as civic engagement within the boundaries of TikTok’s political content rules.) Overall, VoteAmerica spent about 25 percent of its outreach budget on turning out students at historically Black colleges and universities in 2020, VoteAmerica founder and CEO Debra Cleaver told me.

“With 50 kids,” says Kronman, “we can saturate a college campus.”

The business model is not without its challenges. For one thing, “the entire audience turns over 25 percent year over year,” says Kronman, referring to the graduation of seniors. And, says Cleaver, “For all we know by next year, there’ll be some new hotness all the young people will be on.” But for now, says Cleaver, it’s a powerful way to reach otherwise reluctant voters.

Cleaver says that while the scramble of the final days of the campaign didn’t allow for much time to analyze the program’s success, she says that it allowed her group to tap into the triumvirate of factors they know to persuade people to vote: knowing the date of the election, fear of missing out on something everyone’s doing, and a message delivered by a persuasive voice. “The best messenger is someone you trust already,” says Cleaver, and “when I say ‘trusted,’ I mean someone you know, like literally someone from campus.”

There are, naturally, worries that TikTok and its powerful algorithm can be used as a tool for misinformation. “This is a platform that can be very easily used to manipulate people en masse, in an instant,” says Brandi Geurkink, a senior research fellow at the digital-rights group Mozilla Foundation.

But fans of the platform argue it can also do the opposite.

Last year, Trilogy, a left-of-center digital firm, was hired to work on Michigan’s “Yes on Prop 2” campaign. The measure would amend the state constitution with the aim of protecting access to voting, and the campaign to pass it was backed by a coalition of groups that included the Michigan branches of the American Civil Liberties Union and the American Federation of Teachers.

The problem was, polling and focus-group work done by the campaign found that Michigan voters — particularly young Michiganders and Michiganders of color — were suspicious of “voting reform” amid pushes from the right to make voting laws more restrictive. The campaign’s challenge was then, as one focus-group member put it, to convince would-be supporters that the measure was “from the good side.”

With no candidates or other human face to rally around, Trilogy sought other trusted messengers to make the case. A Michigan-native Trilogy staffer, Jake Levy-Pollans, helped pick a handful of hashtags used by TikTok users to narrow in on possible TikTok influencers the campaign might want to work with, including #DTW, as in the location code for Detroit Metro Airport; #pistons, for the local NBA team; and #TheMitten, a reference to the state’s unusual and oft-invoked shape. From there they tossed out, for obvious reasons, anyone showing violent tendencies, and they also dropped from the pool one-hit wonders, or TikTok users whose high-follower count could be traced back to a single blockbuster post.

At the same time, though, they weren’t looking for the biggest names; a rather dry test post found that former University of Michigan basketball player and then-ESPN analyst Jalen Rose — “Your voice needs to be heard,” Rose intones, looking straight at the camera — didn’t have the same bang-for-the-buck traction on TikTok as others with lower public profile but more active on TikTok. They ended up working with 13 creators. A local parent might be paid $800 for a post; the most the campaign offered was $15,000 to a former college sports figure in the state they’d rather not name. The influencers submitted scripts for vetting, but Trilogy CEO Larry Hyunh says they endeavored to only lightly edit them; one video produced by the campaign features Trellevision, an edgy Detroit comedic content creator, who shot a skit of himself in one of his go-to formats, getting yelled at by a drive-through fast-food cashier. (Creators who film while actually driving were out; it’s too irresponsible a look for a political spot, Trilogy staffers say.)

In the sponsored post, just over a minute long, Trellevision tells the cashier that while he intends to vote, he’d do it when he had “some time.” Shoots back the cashier, “Your girl watching the kids and you got Tuesdays off! You outta all people have the time!” Says Hyunh, “It isn’t something that you would typically see in a paid ad. [But] doing it in their style, doing it in a way that communicates with their audience, I find it exhilarating.” Proposition 2 passed.

National campaigns are getting in on the action, too. The presidential campaign of Joe Biden in 2020, for its part, did some light influencer work, partnering with unpaid creators who numbered in the dozens. Many of the influencers the Biden campaign worked with were aimed at connecting with communities of color.

Biden’s attempt to win a second term is also aided by external actors working explicitly in his name. Gen-Z for Change, a coalition of left-leaning volunteer influencers, for example, has helped organize TikTok boosters for the candidate among that coveted sub-26-years-old demographic. And EMILY’s List, the long-standing progressive political action committee that supports women candidates, has said that it plans to spend “tens of millions of dollars” boosting the reputation of Vice President Kamala Harris, including via TikTok. (BlueLabs’ data suggest there might be particular wisdom to that strategy; while frequent TikTok users are generally less politically engaged than their less-TikTok-using counterparts, they were able to correctly identify Harris as vice president at nearly the same rate, 92 percent to 94 percent. “That would suggest that Kamala Harris has some salience with these voters,” says BlueLabs’ Ali Collins.)

While most of the research and experimentation into what TikTok can do for politics is on the left, largely because the app’s users overlap with the demographics of the Democratic Party, that’s not to say there isn’t any hope for Republicans hoping to harness its power.

Eric Wilson, a Republican digital strategist, hopes that whichever Republican runs against Biden avails him or herself of the same TikTok tools. Wilson was the digital director for the 2016 presidential campaign of Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), a prominent critic of the app who has said “It is time to ban Beijing-controlled TikTok for good.”

But research conducted by the Center for Campaign Innovation, a right-of-center group for which Wilson serves as director, found last fall that one in five Republicans between the ages of 18 and 49 open TikTok every day. That’s maybe not a ton of voters, but it’s not nothing — and it’s also likely to increase as users age. Not engaging on TikTok, says Wilson, “is just a total failure to protect our flank.”

“We either need to kill it or embrace it,” says Wilson. He says he tells candidates to think of TikTok like a local tomato festival that draws in great swarms of voters: “You may not like eating tomatoes, but you’ve still got to be there.”

The possibility of a TikTok ban loomed over all of these conversations. During several interviews, strategists and staffers mentioned all of this research and experimentation could be for nothing if Congress or the Biden administration succeeds in implementing a ban on TikTok.

But for now, Republicans are also the ones more likely to support a ban entirely. In March, Sens. Mark Warner (D-Va.) and John Thune (R-S.D.) introduced a TikTok-targeted bill that would empower the Department of Commerce to ban it and similar apps, and its co-sponsors are split nearly evenly between Democrats and Republicans, but it has the backing of just a quarter of the Senate. Of the 32 governors who have banned the app on official devices, a full three-quarters are Republicans. That’s of a piece with the American population at large: A recent Wall Street Journal poll found that 62 percent of Republicans back a ban on the platform, while only 33 percent of Democrats feel the same.

Banning TikTok might feel satisfying, admit campaign experts, but they warn of possible considerable negative consequences — cutting off a channel for reaching a key slice of the American electorate at a time when faith in American democracy is dwindling.

Cheryl Hori, founder of Pacific Campaign House, a left-of-center digital agency that has worked with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Color of Change and the LGBTQ+ group Equality California, argues that restrictions on TikTok hurt the kind of outreach her company does, even if they’re not strict prohibitions. “If you’re going to invest your time in a platform to reach a certain audience and then you know that if you get elected, all that work is gone,” says Hori, “from a 1,000-foot view perspective, it doesn’t make sense to invest it.”

And, says RUN AAPI’s Linh Nguyen, that creators are already preparing to diversify to other platforms, from Snapchat to Discord. “A lot of creators are anticipating, ‘This shit might not be around in a year.’”

For the politicians and advocacy groups who are spending this election cycle trying to break through on TikTok in a bid to reach young voters of color, it presents a brand-new challenge: figuring out where they’re headed next.

POLITICO

Politico · by Nancy Scola

12. Russia deploys its best fighting unit to the front lines

Russia deploys its best fighting unit to the front lines in desperate bid to halt Ukraine advance as counter-offensive achieves breakthrough

• Kyiv claims to have captured the southern city of Robotyne in its push south
• Reports suggest Russia has moved elite units to slow Ukraine's advance 

By CHRIS JEWERS

UPDATED: 10:00 EDT, 28 August 2023

Daily Mail · by Chris Jewers · August 28, 2023

Russia has deployed one of its most elite fighting units to the front lines in a desperate bid to halt Ukraine's advance.

While Kyiv's counter-offensive has made slow progress since it was launched earlier this year, Ukraine reported a breakthrough on Monday saying its troops had liberated the southeastern settlement of Robotyne.

Its forces are now trying to push further south, likely with the ultimate goal of reaching the Sea of Azov to split Russia's 'land bridge' that connects the invading country's mainland to occupied Crimea, providing a vital supply route.

The Ukrainian military said last week that its forces had raised the national flag in the strategic settlement, but were still carrying out mopping-up operations.

In response, reports have said Moscow has deployed its 76th Guard Air Assault Division (GAAD) - sometimes described as Russia's best fighting unit - to the region, with elements being spotted near Robotyne last week.

Russia has deployed one of its most elite fighting units to the frontlines in a desperate bid to halt Ukraine's advance. Pictured: Ukrainian servicemen ride a tank near the village of Robotyne, Zaporizhzhia region, August 25. Ukraine claimed Monday to have taken Robotyne

While Kyiv's counter-offensive has made slow progress since it was launched earlier this year, Ukraine reported a breakthrough on Monday saying its troops had liberated the southeastern settlement of Robotyne

In a daily update on the situation in Ukraine, the Institute for the Study of War - a Washington-based Think Tank, said on Saturday it had seen evidence of 'lateral redeployments of elements of the 7th Guards Mountain VDV Division from Kherson Oblast to the frontline in Zaporizhzhia Oblast, and elements of the 76th VDV Division from the Kreminna area to the Robotyne area'.

This, it said, suggests 'that Russian forces may be using relatively elite units to reinforce critical sectors of the front.'

Yesterday, it repeated the report about elite units being redeployed, adding: 'Russian forces committed a considerable amount of materiel, effort, and manpower to hold the series of defensive positions that Ukrainian forces are currently penetrating'.

It added: 'It is unclear if Russian forces will retain the advantages they have held if they cannot commit the same level of resources and personnel to these next layers of defence. The next Russian defensive layer will, nevertheless, very likely pose significant challenges for the Ukrainian advance.'

Images circulating on Ukrainian social media appeared to show tow Russian unit patches from the 234th and 104th Guards Airborne Assault regiments - both part of the 76th GAAD. The patches were reportedly taken as trophies.

Russia's 234th regiment it believed to have been involved in the Bucha massacre, a mass killing of Ukrainian civilians by Russian soldiers in March 2022.

Extensive reporting by the Associated Press and other news outlets uncovered how the regiment carried out a 'cleansing' operation in the Kyiv suburb, arresting, torturing and murdering Ukrainian residents.

Elements of the 76th GAAD had been fighting in Kremmina in the Luhansk region - around 150 miles to the north-east of Robotyne.

Their sighting around the southern village suggests some have been moved.

Ukrainian soldiers of the Separate Assault Battalion 'Skala' enter the embattled village of Robotyne, Zaporizhzhia region, Ukraine, in this screengrab taken from a handout video released on August 25

Ukrainian forces raise the national flag in the settlement of Robotyne, Zaporizhzhia region, Ukraine, in this screen grab taken from a social media video released August 23, 2023

Ukrainian servicemen fire small multiple launch rocket systems towards Russian troops

The reports come as Ukrainian forces believe they have broken through the most difficult line of Russian defences in the south and that they will now start advancing more quickly, a commander who led troops into Robotyne said last week.

'Robotyne has been liberated,' Deputy Defence Minister Hanna Maliar was quoted as saying by the military.

The settlement is six miles south of the frontline town of Orikhiv in the Zaporizhzhia region on an important road towards Tokmak, a Russian-occupied road and rail hub.

Tokmak's capture would be a milestone as Ukrainian troops press southwards towards the Sea of Azov in a military drive that is intended to split Russian forces following Moscow's full-scale invasion in February 2022.

Kyiv's generals want to reach the city of Melitopol, around 40 miles southwest of Robotyne, in order to cut Russia's 'land bridge' - a swathe of Ukrainian territory currently occupied Moscow's forces that connects Russia to Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsular that was annexed by Vladimir Putin in 2014.

Maliar told Ukrainian television that Kyiv's troops, who began their counteroffensive in early June, were now moving southeast of Robotyne and south of nearby Mala Tokmachka.

Ukraine's success in retaking Robotyne, which Russia has not confirmed, follows media reports of a meeting this month of senior NATO military chiefs and Ukraine's top general on resetting Ukraine's military strategy.

Ukrainian forces are also fighting Russian troops in eastern Ukraine, and progress has been slower than had been widely expected in the counteroffensive because they have encountered vast Russian minefields and trenches.

Maliar described the battlefield situation in the east as 'very hot' in the past week.

She said Russian troops were gathering new forces there and regrouping, and Moscow was aiming to deploy its best troops there.

Ukrainian forces had continued to advance south of Bakhmut, she said, referring to the nearly devastated eastern city that was captured by Moscow's troops in May after months of fierce fighting that resulted in tens of thousands of casualties.

A Ukrainian serviceman walks near a destroyed Ukrainian tank near the village of Robotyne, Zaporizhzhia region, August 25

A Ukrainian serviceman operates an FPV drone from his positions at a front line near the village of Robotyne, Zaporizhzhia region, August 25

She added that in the past week Ukrainian forces had retaken 1 square km (0.39 square mile) around Bakhmut, and Russian troops had not made any advances.

Meanwhile, in the latest of Russia's frequent air strikes on Ukraine, two people were killed overnight when a vegetable oil plant was hit in the central Poltava region, the region's governor said.

Russia said it had shot down a Ukrainian drone flying towards Moscow in the early hours of Monday, in an incident that briefly disrupted flights over the Russian capital.

Reuters could not immediately confirm the situation on the battlefield of the reports of the latest attacks.

Daily Mail · by Chris Jewers · August 28, 2023

13. U.S., Allies Seek Long-Term Military Aid for Ukraine to Show West’s Resolve

Excerpts:

Analysts and some officials argue it would be more effective for the U.S. and its allies to promise delivery dates for weapons that could improve Ukraine’s security in the long term. 

“What the U.S. needs to do is provide specifics for what kind of weapons systems it will provide Ukraine,” said Seth Jones, director of the international security program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “The U.S. could make a commitment today to provide F-16s or other fighter aircraft, for example.” 

Speaking to reporters last week, U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan alluded to European concerns about Washington’s future support for Ukraine. He said despite opposition from some House Republicans, strong bipartisan support remained for Kyiv and that he had communicated that to Ukraine and European partners. 

During his first term, Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Paris climate treaty and the Iranian nuclear deal, an unusual break by an American president of U.S. commitments made by predecessors. 

The current administration can’t legally bind a future administration to financial commitments made to Ukraine although Republicans in Congress could press a future GOP administration to maintain the support. 

If Washington were to significantly scale back its support for Ukraine, Europe is unlikely to be financially or militarily capable of stepping in to close the gap. While most European governments remain committed to supporting Ukraine, the continent faces tight fiscal pressures and few countries have defense industries able to match U.S. firepower.

The leading European weapons contributors, the U.K. and Germany, have earmarked some $7 billion to $8 billion respectively in military support for Ukraine, according to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, less than one fifth of U.S. support.

U.S., Allies Seek Long-Term Military Aid for Ukraine to Show West’s Resolve

Weapons shortages, domestic political pressures hamper Western efforts

By Laurence Norman

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 and Nancy A. Youssef

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Updated Aug. 29, 2023 12:00 am ET

https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/u-s-allies-seek-long-term-military-aid-for-ukraine-to-show-wests-resolve-6964c66f?mod=hp_lead_pos1

European officials fear that Russian President Vladimir Putin will keep fighting in Ukraine until after the 2024 U.S. election, hoping a Republican victory would mean an end to American military aid. PHOTO: LIBKOS/ASSOCIATED PRESS

The Biden administration and its European allies are laying plans for long-term military assistance to Ukraine to ensure Russia won’t be able to win on the battlefield and persuade the Kremlin that Western support for Kyiv won’t waver.

The effort, building on commitments made at a Group of Seven leaders meeting on the sidelines of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit in July in Vilnius, Lithuania, so far involves bilateral negotiations between the U.S. and Ukraine and the U.K. and Ukraine. About 18 non-G-7 countries have signed up to the group’s pledge to provide long-term assistance to Kyiv, including the Netherlands, Sweden and other European countries.

The goal is to make sure Ukraine will be strong enough in the future to deter Russia from attacking it again. More immediately, Ukraine’s Western allies hope to discourage the Kremlin from thinking it can wait out the Biden administration for a potentially more sympathetic successor in the White House. 

Western officials are looking for ways to lock in pledges of support and limit future governments’ abilities to backtrack, amid fears in European capitals that Donald Trump, if he recaptures the White House, would seek to scale back aid. Trump has a wide lead in early polling in the Republican presidential primary field, but soundly lost the 2020 election to President Biden and has been indicted in four criminal cases in state and federal courts. 

While the initiative shares broad support among G-7 countries, the practicalities are proving complicated, officials say. Among other issues, the Biden administration is limited in its ability to bind future administrations to international agreements—and Trump has already proven willing to reverse his predecessors’ deals with foreign capitals. In addition, European states lack the financial and military capacity to pick up the slack should a future president reduce and terminate U.S. aid to Kyiv.

Among European officials, concern is growing that Russian President Vladimir Putin will keep fighting in Ukraine until after the 2024 U.S. presidential election, hoping that a Republican victory would lead to an end of American military support. So far, the U.S. has sent Ukraine more than $40 billion worth of weapons and equipment. 

While there has been broad bipartisan support of Ukraine, leading Republican presidential candidates have signaled U.S. support should wind down. Trump has said he would put a stop to the war in a day, by threatening both sides that he would support the other if they didn’t come to the negotiating table to make a settlement.

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After going out of production in 2012, StarStreak missiles are being revived to help Ukraine’s air defense. WSJ examines how the British missile stands out among its peers and why its unique features allow it to see past Russian countermeasures. Photo illustration: Annie Zhao

During the first Republican presidential debate last week, other candidates said that, if elected, they wouldn’t sustain the current level of U.S. support for Ukraine.  

At the July summit in Vilnius, the Group of Seven developed democracies pledged to make arrangements on “specific, bilateral, long-term security commitments” for Ukraine.

By setting out what French officials have said should be a four-year period of military-aid commitments, Western capitals hope to persuade the Kremlin that Russia can’t wait for European and U.S. support for Ukraine to drain away.

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What do you think the West’s long-term military assistance to Ukraine should entail? Join the conversation below.

European officials have warned it will take many months to prepare the plans, with some of the bilateral arrangements expected to come together only next year. There is also no common view on how detailed the pledges should be. They also need to work out with Ukraine—in the midst of the current conflict—what the country’s future military needs might be. They will need to coordinate the bilateral negotiations among Western capitals and ensure allied defense industries can produce the promised military assistance to Ukraine without undercutting the need of Western militaries to restock and expand their own capabilities. 

Protecting future spending

Without credible packages of support, Russia is unlikely to be deterred from continuing the war, Western officials acknowledge.

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A basic political problem hovers above all these difficulties: Will current governments be able to effectively carve out and protect military spending for Ukraine in future years when they may no longer be in power?

Nowhere is the answer to the question more uncertain than in Washington. European allies are already bracing for the possibility that the Biden administration’s long-term pledges will be weaker than hoped or too vague to offer credible deterrence against Russia. 

President Biden with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in July at the NATO summit, in Vilnius, Lithuania. PHOTO: PAUL ELLIS/PRESS POOL

While Biden said during the NATO meeting in Vilnius that the U.S. “will negotiate long-term bilateral security commitments with them to Ukraine,” U.S. officials said they have yet to determine what that agreement would look like. 

One proposal, an administration official said, would be for the U.S. and Ukraine to agree on a memorandum of understanding, stopping short of a treaty-like agreement. An MOU wouldn’t require congressional approval.

On Aug. 3, the State Department said it led the first U.S. meeting on the potential shape of a long-term U.S. agreement. Ukrainian officials, along with representatives from the Pentagon and White House were part of the discussions, it said. 

“Our bilateral security commitments will focus on ensuring Ukraine has a sustainable force capable of defending Ukraine now and deterring Russian aggression in the future,” the State Department said. 

Analysts and some officials argue it would be more effective for the U.S. and its allies to promise delivery dates for weapons that could improve Ukraine’s security in the long term. 

“What the U.S. needs to do is provide specifics for what kind of weapons systems it will provide Ukraine,” said Seth Jones, director of the international security program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “The U.S. could make a commitment today to provide F-16s or other fighter aircraft, for example.” 

Speaking to reporters last week, U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan alluded to European concerns about Washington’s future support for Ukraine. He said despite opposition from some House Republicans, strong bipartisan support remained for Kyiv and that he had communicated that to Ukraine and European partners. 

During his first term, Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Paris climate treaty and the Iranian nuclear deal, an unusual break by an American president of U.S. commitments made by predecessors. 

The current administration can’t legally bind a future administration to financial commitments made to Ukraine although Republicans in Congress could press a future GOP administration to maintain the support. 

If Washington were to significantly scale back its support for Ukraine, Europe is unlikely to be financially or militarily capable of stepping in to close the gap. While most European governments remain committed to supporting Ukraine, the continent faces tight fiscal pressures and few countries have defense industries able to match U.S. firepower.

The leading European weapons contributors, the U.K. and Germany, have earmarked some $7 billion to $8 billion respectively in military support for Ukraine, according to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, less than one fifth of U.S. support.

Long-term aims

The U.K. in mid-August became the second country to start negotiations with Ukraine on the security commitments—a few days after the U.S. meeting that included Kyiv officials. After the discussions, Andriy Yermak, head of the office of the Ukrainian president, who led Kyiv’s delegation, said his government hopes to complete the first agreements by the end of 2023.

A senior French official said Paris expects to start negotiations in the next few weeks. U.S. officials say they hope to hold a second meeting with Ukraine in the coming weeks.

Andriy Yermak led Kyiv’s delegation in talks with the U.K. on security commitments. PHOTO: UKRAINIAN PRESIDENTIAL/ZUMA PRESS

“Security guarantees for Ukraine—the next rounds of talks, as well as the addition of new countries to the common security architecture, are coming soon,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on social-media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, on Sunday. 

Elsewhere in Europe, negotiations are yet to start but officials in France and Germany are sketching out the kind of support they could provide Ukraine.

In late March, the German parliament’s budget committee approved additional defense funding for Ukraine of 3.2 billion euros (about $3.5 billion) this year and credit lines for the period between 2024 and 2032 amounting to some 8.8 billion euros.

In France in July, the parliament approved the biggest military spending hike in half a century for the 2024-30 period, driven in part by military and defense industry capacities to help Ukraine.

Yet bringing all this together into a credible Western package will be a daunting task, Jones said, until the alliance spells out its long-term aims. 

“What does the broader U.S. and NATO objective look like? They haven’t publicly provided a road map,” he said.

Write to Laurence Norman at laurence.norman@wsj.com and Nancy A. Youssef at nancy.youssef@wsj.com

14. The World Is Contemplating a Second Trump Administration

The question I receive most from friends overseas is what will a second Trump administration mean for X or Y alliance.  

The World Is Contemplating a Second Trump Administration

Possibility that former president will win next year’s election has capitals across globe on edge

By Stacy Meichtry

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 in Paris, Austin Ramzy

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 in Hong Kong and Bojan Pancevski

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 in Berlin

Updated Aug. 28, 2023 12:03 am ET

https://www.wsj.com/world/the-world-is-contemplating-a-second-trump-administration-f6e970c4?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=1

President Donald Trump appearing on a Beijing TV screen as U.S. votes were counted in November 2020. PHOTO: KEVIN FRAYER/GETTY IMAGES

The U.S. presidential election is more than a year away, but allies and adversaries around the world have already begun to contemplate—and even plan for—the return of Donald Trump to the White House.

For many foreign capitals, the possibility of a second Trump administration is a source of anxiety. Allies from Paris to Tokyo regard Trump as an erratic leader with little interest in cultivating long-term ties to counter Russian and Chinese expansionism.

Others, including Beijing and Moscow, see potential benefits from Trump, whom they view as a transactional leader who might be willing to strike deals to ease tensions in hot spots such as Ukraine and Taiwan, according to analysts. Nationalist and populist politicians also voice support for Trump’s ambitions.

Policy makers and politicians were reluctant to make public statements that might rile the current administration or an incoming one. But officials interviewed by The Wall Street Journal did share their thoughts about what a Trump return to the world stage would mean for geopolitics.

Among the most widespread fears is that Trump would spark a global trade war. The candidate has threatened to impose fresh tariffs on all goods imported into the U.S.—hitting friend and foe alike—a move that risks sowing divisions in trans-Atlantic relations in a time of war.

Ukrainian soldiers firing toward Russian positions at the front line near Bakhmut, Ukraine. PHOTO: LIBKOS/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Trump has also threatened to withdraw the U.S. from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a move that his former national security adviser John Bolton recently described as a near certainty if he is elected again.

Some governments are moving to lock in military assistance to Ukraine to strengthen security there in case a newly elected Trump scales back U.S. support. Members of the Group of Seven wealthy nations are trying to reach bilateral agreements with Kyiv to provide weapons that meet NATO standards.

“There’s a strong possibility Trump might be re-elected,” said Benjamin Haddad, a French lawmaker from President Emmanuel Macron’s party. “It forces us Europeans to read the writing on the wall and take more responsibility.”

With Russia digging in for a long fight in Ukraine, the Kremlin is waiting out the Biden administration in the hope that Trump, if elected, would back away from helping Kyiv. U.S. support for Taiwan could waver under Trump, according to analysts, if Beijing dangles concessions on trade.

“Trump values U.S. allies less, and Beijing therefore expects that U.S. alliances and coalitions would fray and ease pressure on China,” said Bonnie Glaser, managing director of the Indo-Pacific program at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.

Those scenarios send a chill down the spine of allies in Europe and the Pacific.

The Biden administration has worked to corral allies in Asia, deepening military cooperation and helping mend relations between Japan and South Korea. And Washington has sent billions of dollars in arms and humanitarian aid to Ukraine, allowing Kyiv to hold its own on the battlefield against Russia.

French officials have been warning European allies that the possibility of Trump’s return requires the continent to significantly expand arms production, from artillery to missile defense systems, so it can supply Ukraine on its own.

Eastern European countries and France are also pushing allies to admit Ukraine into NATO, a move that would significantly raise the stakes with Russia by providing Kyiv with security guarantees.

“We’ve been lucky with Ukraine to have an American administration that helped us,” Macron recently told Le Point magazine. “Can we let Ukraine lose and Russia win? The answer is no…We have to hold out over time.”

Military expenditures are rising across the continent, but Europe has struggled to wean itself off American hardware. Macron was blindsided when a German-led coalition announced plans to spend billions of euros on a program to buy Patriot missile systems from the U.S., snubbing a rival system developed by France, Italy and the U.K.

Macron has long been skeptical that President Biden’s election in 2020 signaled the end of the Trump era, according to Biden. Biden has recounted arriving at his first G-7 summit as president, declaring to his peers: “America’s back.” Macron replied: “For how long?”

Macron’s office declined to comment.

French President Emmanuel Macron at ceremony honoring a top French general who died this month. PHOTO: CHRISTIAN HARTMANN/PRESS POOL

Trump has vowed to impose sweeping new tariffs, stating in a recent interview that he would set an automatic 10% tariff on all foreign imports to the U.S.

“When companies come in and they dump their products in the United States, they should pay, automatically, let’s say a 10% tax,” Trump said in an interview with Fox Business. “I do like the 10% for everybody.”

Economists were quick to warn that Trump’s proposal could ignite a global trade war and raise prices for U.S. consumers. The White House slammed Trump’s comments, saying Biden strongly opposes the plan.

Germany, Europe’s economic powerhouse, is focused on forging channels of communication in an effort to avoid the experience of 2016, when Trump’s election took world leaders by surprise. The government of Angela Merkel, who was then chancellor, struggled to gain access to the White House as Washington aimed a barrage of tariffs at Germany and other countries in Europe. Relations between Trump and Merkel quickly soured.

Leading members of the three parties of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s governing coalition have been jetting across the Atlantic ever since they took power in late 2021, meeting with GOP officials and Trump confidants. A key Scholz aide, Wolfgang Schmidt, has made regular visits to Washington, forging links with key Republicans. In September, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock will embark on a 10-day visit to the U.S., including an extended visit to Texas, a GOP bastion, to familiarize herself with the party.

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Donald Trump surrendered to Fulton County, Ga., authorities on Thursday. He was indicted by a grand jury over his efforts to overturn the state’s 2020 election results. Photos: Fulton County Sheriff’s Office/Brynn Anderson/AP

Some governments welcome the possibility of Trump’s return. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who maintains a friendly relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin and opposes Western arms deliveries to Ukraine, has said on numerous occasions he hopes Trump wins the next election, even as Trump’s legal woes have mounted. “Keep on fighting, Mr. President! We are with you,” Orban wrote in a recent social-media post.

For China, Trump was the leader who ignited trade tensions with the U.S. while a Biden presidency held out the prospect of a return to the previous era of relations, when many U.S. policy makers supported free trade in the belief that it would liberalize China.

But Biden maintained much of his predecessor’s tough policies toward Beijing. Tariffs remained in place. Restrictions on Chinese technology companies expanded, including a U.S. ban on sales of advanced semiconductors and chip-making equipment to China last year.

“On policy substance, even though Trump kicked off the trade war, it was Biden that implemented policy more effectively and was able to bring in important allies that Trump had alienated,” said Mary Gallagher, a political-science professor at the University of Michigan.

President Biden meeting with South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida at Camp David in August. PHOTO: NATHAN HOWARD/PRESS POOL

South Korea and Japan this year turned the page on years of historical quarrels, allowing for deeper military coordination with Washington.

South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol forged a personal bond with Biden during an official state visit in April to the White House and on a recent trip to Camp David. That contrasts with Trump, who criticized Seoul for not paying enough for the roughly 28,500 U.S. military personnel stationed in South Korea. Trump even suggested a troop drawdown.

Yorizumi Watanabe, a former Japanese diplomat, said he expects support for Trump to rise in Japan if he moves decisively to calm tensions with China. “When all is said and done, we need a strong American president.”

In the Middle East, the leaders of Israel and Saudi Arabia are weighing whether their push to establish diplomatic ties have a better shot with Biden in office or Trump. While leaders in both countries have had chilly relations with Biden, they are wrestling with the possibility that the Democratic president might be better positioned than Trump to broker a pact.

Trump remains broadly popular with the Israeli public and aligned with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, which bills itself as the most right-wing and religious in the country’s history. But Trump was critical of Netanyahu after the prime minister congratulated Biden on his 2020 victory.

In an interview this summer, Netanyahu praised Trump, but he declined to say whether he had been in close contact with him. “I think he did things that were superb for Israel’s security,” Netanyahu said. “So I value that.”

Iran is moving to release U.S. detainees in a bid to gain access to around $6 billion in oil revenue. The money, which was effectively frozen in South Korea under U.S. sanctions, is being transferred through Switzerland to Qatar for possible release to Iran.

This month, Iran moved four U.S. citizens from prison to house arrest, the first step in a hoped-for prisoner release agreement between Tehran and the Biden administration. Trump as president withdrew from the 2015 deal that placed limits on Iran’s nuclear program in return for lifting sanctions. He ratcheted up sanctions on Iran and criticized the release of frozen Iranian funds by the Obama administration.

Securing the funds is now a key objective for Tehran, a visible signal to ordinary Iranians that the regime is seeking to improve the country’s troubled economy, said Alex Vatanka, director of the Iran program at the Middle East Institute, a nonpartisan think tank. “They’re trying to get as many concessions as they can out of the Biden team,” he said.

Dion Nissenbaum, Sabrina Siddiqui, David S. Cloud, Laurence Norman, Timothy W. Martin and Chieko Tsuneoka contributed to this article.

Write to Stacy Meichtry at Stacy.Meichtry@wsj.com, Austin Ramzy at austin.ramzy@wsj.com and Bojan Pancevski at bojan.pancevski@wsj.com

Copyright ©2023 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Appeared in the August 28, 2023, print edition as 'World Mulls Prospect Of a New Trump Term'.

15. The White House Must Close Its Hostage Bazaar with Iran and Russia

The White House Must Close Its Hostage Bazaar with Iran and Russia

19fortyfive.com · by Peter Doran · August 25, 2023

The setting was dramatic and the stakes were high. In the summer of 1987, millions of Americans tuned into the Iran-Contra hearings to witness Secretary of State George Shultz deliver a master class on why America should never exchange prisoners or other rewards for U.S. hostages. “Lord deliver us from such bright ideas as that,” he said with grave derision. Such deals would create a hostage bazaar that would never run short on supply. “The minute you pay for a hostage, you give an incentive to people to take more hostages,” Shultz explained.

The Biden administration has refused to learn this lesson, this month agreeing to release $6 billion of frozen oil revenue in exchange for Tehran’s release of five hostages. The message for Vladimir Putin, whose American hostages include Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, is that this is a seller’s market, and opening bids should be in the billions.

There are two centuries of evidence to support the notion that paying for hostages creates a market for them. In the early 1800s, the young United States was paying Barbary pirates gigantic sums worth $10-20 billion per year in today’s money for annual returns of American hostages. Over time, this policy shifted. Washington would no longer negotiate with pirates and terrorists, but it would still cut deals with hostile governments. Shultz had to testify in 1987 because the president he served made the mistake of trading arms for hostages with Iran, which promptly resulted in the taking of more hostages.

Joe Biden was already a Senate veteran in 1987 but seems not to recall Shultz’s advice. For Biden, paying off Iran is the sequel to paying off Russia. Late last year, the White House released to Russia the infamous “Merchant of Death” Viktor Bout, a detestable arms dealer, in exchange for American pro basketball player Brittney Griner. “How is it acceptable for someone like Brittney Griner to be put…in a Russian penal colony, in horrific circumstances that she did not deserve?” said one U.S. official, explaining the “moral obligation” the White House felt to secure Griner’s release.

Perhaps the sentiment was understandable. However, Russia’s next move was predictable. After releasing Griner, Moscow took a replacement hostage: Gershkovich. He joined fellow Americans Paul Whelan and Marc Fogel as hostages in the Russian prison system. As Shultz foresaw, the White House created an incentive for Russia and others to take people as bargaining chips. And the costs of these deals are likely to rise.

Importantly, the Administration’s hostage swapping is not occurring in a vacuum. In the case of Iran, the cash transfers to Tehran could be laying the groundwork for a reboot of Barack Obama’s nuclear deal and an accompanying easing of sanctions. Likewise, Russia appears keen to negotiate a break from the “swift and severe” sanctions that the White House imposed on the Kremlin after its expanded invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Could Moscow use its hostages to negotiate a similar respite as the one potentially on offer to the Iranians? Will it use its hostages as leverage to temper American support for Ukraine? Or will Putin simply look to spring from jail the various Russian spies and cybercriminals that the United States and its allies have imprisoned?

The problem with the White House’s hostage trading is that it treats Iran and Russia as normal, status quo countries. They are not. Both obviously fall into the category of either state sponsors of terror or outright terrorist states. The administration’s folly is that it has not made this moral, legal, and geostrategic distinction in either case. Violating the Shultz doctrine, it has opened a hostage bazar for our people. This will only invite more predation by America’s enemies.

When you are in a hole, stop digging. That should be the first step for the White House. There should be no more ransoms. The Shultz doctrine should reign supreme. Stop giving away the store and encouraging America’s adversaries.

About the Author, Peter B. Doran

Peter B. Doran is an adjunct senior fellow at FDD. He is the former president of the Center for European Policy Analysis. A recognized expert on Russia, Ukraine, and transatlantic relations, he has testified before Congress on topics covering geopolitics and energy security and state-sponsored disinformation. He contributes articles for Time, Foreign Policy, Defense News, National Review, and The Hill. He is also the author of Breaking Rockefeller (Penguin), which examines the rise of Russian oil. He holds a master’s degree from the Center for Eurasian, Russian, and East European Studies at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. He received undergraduate degrees in history and Russian from Arizona State University’s Barrett Honors College.

In this article:

Written By Peter Doran

16. Carrier Strike Groups Should Be Ready to Go Dark in Conflict

Excerpts:

In a fight with China, U.S. warships should gracefully retrograde their onboard technological information warfare capabilities. Some warfare areas already embrace this trend. At Naval Officer Candidate School, officers practice navigation with paper charts and maneuvering boards lest GPS stops working. The information warfare community should also go back to basics, back to pen and paper, back to the fundamental resources that allowed the U.S. Navy to maneuver undetected without sacrificing lethality in previous clashes. Routine drills that test a strike group’s ability to control its emissions and operate in a restrictive communications environment are an ideal opportunity to test and train all information warriors.

After two decades of post-Cold War technological advancement, the information warfare community has grown complacent, dependent on advanced, data-intensive tools that may be degraded or ineffective in conflict. Only by developing and reinstating resilient, low-emission, and low-tech capabilities will carrier strike groups be able to neuter China’s anti-access/area denial threat and mount a formidable challenge to the adversary.

Carrier Strike Groups Should Be Ready to Go Dark in Conflict - War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · by Nick Danby · August 29, 2023

The multiple “Taiwan war” games now being fought at think tanks and universities across the United States share something in common: A Chinese missile strike on a U.S. aircraft carrier during the war’s opening volleys. For the adversary team, it is common to continue targeting U.S. carriers throughout conflict. But how long can the strike group evade one of China’s far-reaching Dongfeng anti-ship ballistic missiles? And even if the carrier dodges a DF-26 anti-ship ballistic missile (with an estimated range of 2,200 nautical miles), what can the carrier strike group offensively bring to the fight?

The short answer? Not much.

During multiple iterations of a 2022 Center for Strategic and International Studies war game, at least two U.S. aircraft carriers were sunk and their air wings destroyed. If a carrier somehow managed to flee the second island chain unscathed from the war’s initial salvos, it would have to continue operating (or hiding) outside the second island chain until U.S. submarines and bombers cleared out China’s “carrier-killer” platforms.

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Based on these war games, contemporary navalists are now coming up with ways to defend strike groups. Strategists should also be thinking about how to make them force multipliers. The U.S. Navy’s 11 aircraft carriers rack up an annual $13 billion in operating costs alone. For that kind of money, U.S. taxpayers deserve more than 11 wartime liabilities.

Should the United States face a real conflict with China, carriers will need to “go dark” for two reasons. Carriers may decide to strangle their unique (military) emissions to escape detection and targeting (emissions control). Or they may be forced to operate without external communications because the Chinese military has jammed U.S. radars or knocked out satellite constellations (operating in a denied and degraded command-and-control environment).

The U.S. sea services should develop and deploy tactics, techniques, and procedures that stress-test the carrier strike group in order to ensure it can offensively operate under emissions control and a denied and degraded command-and-control environment all while maintaining superior battlespace awareness.

Presently, such awareness demands gigabytes of data derived from sophisticated, high-bandwidth satellite communications and internet protocol-based radio networks. In conflict, these tools could vanish. As the carrier strike group operates alone and unafraid, information warriors will need to wean themselves off emission-intensive methods and go “back to basics.” This will require resurrecting the carrier’s organic resources and low-emission communication methods while shifting from a “transmit” to a “receive” mindset.

Areas of Uncertainty

The People’s Liberation Army has spent two decades training a counter-intervention force and building an anti-access/area denial zone that depends on a diverse, multi-domain battle network to either destroy or blind American aircraft carriers.

First, in order to destroy U.S. carriers, the Chinese military has developed a “constant, controllable, and high-impact” network that integrates with “high-intensity and fast-paced” precision strikes to wreak “irreversible damage and powerful destruction” on U.S. forces. Although the DF-21D and DF-26B anti-ship ballistic missiles are the archetypal “carrier-killer” missiles, U.S. aircraft carriers are enveloped by overlapping weapon engagement zones, or WEZ, the moment they enter the second island chain. Many of my Navy colleagues like to say we “wake up in the WEZ.” And it’s true. Chinese anti-ship cruise missiles — launched from submarines, surface units, fighters, and bombers — can join anti-ship ballistic missiles in attacking a carrier and its escorts as far east as Guam. Moreover, the Chinese military has left few doubts about which ships are in its boresight. In late 2021, the People’s Liberation Army constructed a mock two-dimensional silhouette of an American carrier strike group (one aircraft carrier and two Arleigh Burke-class destroyers) at the Ruoqiang missile range in central China for probable DF-21D target practice.

Sheer capability and intent, however doesn’t confer lethality. In 2018, Forbes writer Loren Thompson reasoned that the People’s Liberation Army would be hard-pressed to find, fix, track, and target a carrier, skirt its “multilayered defense,” strike it, and collect an accurate bomb hit assessment. A carrier’s real-time maneuverability, he argued, would allow it to avoid detection altogether or transit far enough between Chinese military detection and launch to flee missiles.

Unfortunately, in my experience, escaping from China’s well-linked kill web is harder than it sounds.

The Strongman of Space

China’s diverse suite of sensors likely provides its military with a reliable common operating picture to strike adversary targets. Surface ships, unmanned surface vessels, maritime militia units, or over-the-horizon radar sites can tip and cue unmanned aerial vehicles, special mission aircraft, and China’s distributed, redundant imaging and signals intelligence satellites to build and maintain a quality target track for anti-ship cruise and ballistic missiles to engage. And when the carrier strike group moves — as ships do — these missiles’ advanced homing systems close the area of uncertainty and strike.

For more than a decade, Chinese military doctrine has emphasized the importance of “outer space and cyber space.”. Lectures on the Sciences of Space Operations, a pivotal Chinese military treatise on the future of space warfare released in 2013 by the People’s Liberation Army Academy of Military Sciences, argues that whoever wields “space superiority will master the initiative in warfare.” No space support? No victory. Yet these writings also see space superiority as a zero-sum game. Future space operations, according to Lectures, demands guaranteeing one’s own “space strengths” while “limit[ing], weaken[ing], and destroy[ing] the enemy’s space strengths.” This almost certainly requires China’s Strategic Support and Rocket Forces to “blind and deafen” U.S. carriers by destroying key operational and communication nodes that require persistent network access, thereby paralyzing American naval operations. To achieve this, Chinese military theorists recommend a combination of soft- and hard-kill methods to destroy critical military hubs, nodes, and networks including intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, early warning, navigation and positioning, and imaging and communication satellites.

From a soft-kill perspective, the People’s Liberation Army will probably jam ship-borne radars and GPS. It could also wage offensive cyber operations against a satellite’s ground-control link. Kinetically, the People’s Liberation Army has developed operational ground-based antisatellite missiles to target U.S. satellites in low-earth orbit and likely are developing antisatellite weapons to strike GPS and communications satellite architecture. These satellites are critical to strike group operations.

To defend against these threats, a carrier would have no choice but to “go dark.” Regaining those senses requires carrier strike groups to become comfortable and capable operating alone. Fortunately, routine practice operating in a denied and degraded communications environment can neuter the Chinese military’s two-pronged destructive strategy.

Passivity Begets Lethality

In an August 2022 Proceedings piece, Patrick Goldman urged ships to set a strict emissions control posture underway to familiarize sailors and mask the ship’s “electronic footprint.” Operating in such a way, Goldman argued, will make surface ships a “force multiplier” and provide “a strategic advantage.” Evading the enemy may tire them out, but going dark will still not make strike groups an effective fighting force.

In fact, a strike group will become a force liability if it operates with little awareness of what lies over the horizon. To overcome this challenge, the Navy should consider four options.

The first is deploying passive detection sensors to track the adversary while operating in their anti-access/area denial zone undetected. Passive sensors generate no detectable signals. These sensors instead collect signals, silently listening for emissions bouncing around the battlespace. Processors or analysts correlate these raw signals to specific radars and platforms. And because passive sensors do not emit signals, the adversary will not find them. These sensors allow U.S. commanders to build an accurate common operating picture while minimizing risk to the force.

The U.S. military has made advancements in passive surveillance. Raytheon’s advanced radar detection system, for example, is a passive electronic intelligence sensor attached to sea or ground platforms, designed to detect ground-based emissions. The new shipboard panoramic electro-optic/infrared program will provide U.S. warships with “a scalable 360-degree electro-optic/infrared passive automatic detection and tracking solution.” But these advances do not go far enough. Raytheon’s radar detection system should be upgraded to detect sea- and air-based emissions, too. The current detection range of passive sensors already on board warships should be extended. In short, the U.S. Navy should allocate more research and development to passive signals intelligence and electronic intelligence sensors that will enable strike groups to avoid detection and protect the fleet while finding and striking the enemy before the enemy responds in kind.

The U.S. military should also develop an intelligence and surveillance network organic to the carrier strike group. During the Cold War, a strike group largely relied on its carrier air wings to know what lurked over the horizon. Back then, air wings fielded a host of organic intelligence and surveillance platforms, including electronic intelligence collectors (ES-3A Shadow), submarine hunters (S-3 Viking), and the F-14 Tomcat’s tactical airborne reconnaissance pod imagery collection system.

Advancement of national sensors and theater reconnaissance platforms (such as the P-8, RC-135V/W, MQ-4C) since the Cold War allowed air wings to abandon these missions. But in a conflict with China, strike groups will likely lack the bandwidth to access information derived from national technical means — if such means remain operable. And although theater intelligence and surveillance aircraft may be able to transmit data to aircraft carriers, theater and national tasking may out-prioritize strike group collection requirements. Left alone, the strike group should develop an organic surveillance network to identify, locate, and track adversary forces and unknown units within its surveillance areas. This collection architecture necessitates three lines of effort.

First, develop carrier-borne, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance-focused unmanned aerial vehicles. The Navy should upgrade the MQ-25 Stingray unmanned tanker into a sensing platform. It should carry an electro-optical/infrared camera, synthetic aperture radar with maritime moving target indicator functionality, and a signals intelligence payload. This platform should penetrate deep into the first island chain and emphasize stealth capabilities to reduce its radar cross-section. To ameliorate detection, carriers could also maintain control of the drones for launch and recovery but transfer control to a ground station to execute strike group tasking and report activity via long-range radio communication.

Second, incorporate unmanned surface vehicles into the strike group as escorts. The Navy has decided to match China’s ambitious shipbuilding program by investing in a “ghost fleet,” comprised of an estimated 150 unmanned surface combatants by 2040. Each strike group should be equipped with at least three unmanned surface vehicles to support strike group movements, much like manned cruisers and destroyers. Tasking would include antisubmarine warfare, mine countermeasures, intelligence and reconnaissance capabilities, and counter-surveillance detection.

Third, remember that every aircraft is a sensor. All carrier air wing platforms should contribute to the strike group’s surface search coordination mission. This intelligence and surveillance tasking should not subvert primary missions, but aviators should communicate in real time with strike group intelligence cells to gain and contribute to greater awareness during flight operations and proficiency training. This includes information warriors directing surface search missions to prosecute unknown or adversarial units operating near the carrier.

The Navy should also embrace secure low-emission radio communications or “receive transmissions.” Long before emails and internet-based messaging tools, U.S. warships could communicate with surface units outside the strike group or at higher-echelon commands and support elements using secure, high-frequency communications that can be exempt from certain emissions-control restrictions. Most U.S. Navy ships still sail with these devices, despite their age. Information technicians should be trained to work on, troubleshoot, and improve them. When operating in a denied or degraded command-and-control environment, high-frequency transmissions are largely immune to enemy interference and offer a redundant alternative to satellite communications. Unfortunately, high-frequency communications are easy for adversaries to intercept and locate. Ships transmitting via high-frequency communications risk being found and targeted, which is why shore-based command-and-control nodes should broadcast vital tactical information to ships at sea without those ships giving away their positions by acknowledging receipt. Additionally, surface units should utilize onboard “receive-only” communication platforms to receive intelligence products and tippers from higher headquarters that can provide threat warnings and influence the commander’s decisions.

Finally, the U.S. Navy should invest in systems to better understand the theater’s pattern of life. Online tools that seek to autonomously classify surface or air contacts permit shipboard intelligence personnel to become proficient in disseminating packaged intelligence but not analyzing data or exploiting information — two key steps in the intelligence cycle. Carrier strike group intelligence cells should develop hard-copy libraries and study guides that document Chinese military assets, capabilities, and bases as well as images or “heat maps” with known operating areas for adversary platforms. If cut off from outside or external intelligence sources, the carrier should have its own threat libraries and expertise to remain tactically viable.

Sailing Solo

In a fight with China, U.S. warships should gracefully retrograde their onboard technological information warfare capabilities. Some warfare areas already embrace this trend. At Naval Officer Candidate School, officers practice navigation with paper charts and maneuvering boards lest GPS stops working. The information warfare community should also go back to basics, back to pen and paper, back to the fundamental resources that allowed the U.S. Navy to maneuver undetected without sacrificing lethality in previous clashes. Routine drills that test a strike group’s ability to control its emissions and operate in a restrictive communications environment are an ideal opportunity to test and train all information warriors.

After two decades of post-Cold War technological advancement, the information warfare community has grown complacent, dependent on advanced, data-intensive tools that may be degraded or ineffective in conflict. Only by developing and reinstating resilient, low-emission, and low-tech capabilities will carrier strike groups be able to neuter China’s anti-access/area denial threat and mount a formidable challenge to the adversary.

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Nick Danby is an active-duty U.S. naval intelligence officer. He is assigned to Carrier Strike Group Five staff, permanently embarked on USS Ronald Reagan (CVN-76) in Yokosuka, Japan. He graduated magna cum laude with highest honors from Harvard University. He has been published in Proceedings, Naval History, The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, The Journal of Indo-Pacific Affairs, and The Diplomat, among other publications.

The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Navy, Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Nick Danby · August 29, 2023

17. Three Proposals to Raise the Profile of Irregular Warfare (Book Review)

Conclusion:

This book is intended to spur critical reflection, and then eventually improvement, in the performance of the United States in IW environments. The United States has faced significant challenges over the last 40 years in areas including stability operations, counterdrug campaigns, counterinsurgency, and counterterrorism. Conflict and competition below the threshold of declared war to influence populations will continue to be critically important to our foreign policy and national defense. Members of Congress, commanders, policy makers, and interested civilians should take this book’s recommendations to heart to begin the process of improving the American way of irregular war.

Three Proposals to Raise the Profile of Irregular Warfare (Book Review) - Irregular Warfare Initiative

irregularwarfare.org · by Brian Nau · August 29, 2023

Those who want to see US performance improve in execution of population influence campaigns would do well to read The American Way of Irregular War: An Analytic Memoir by retired General Charles Cleveland, with research and cowriting from Daniel Egel. According to the authors, these Population-Centric Conflicts, or PCCs, can occur in political, economic, information, intelligence, and legal realms, and stand in stark contrast to conventional wars between states, which focus on controlling and holding territory using military forces. Cleveland served 37 years in the US Army, primarily in Special Forces, concluding his career by commanding US Army Special Operations Command. By Cleveland’s account, the book emerged from reflection on his career, which led him to conclude that, “… from 1978 to 2015, the United States failed to achieve its strategic objectives in nearly every military campaign in which [he] was involved.”

Cleveland identifies several reasons for these failures through observations about US performance in irregular warfare, or IW, over the course of his career. Central to his critique is his observation that there is no proponent for IW across the US interagency. This observation drives recommendations for congressional review and a call for concerned US citizens to “establish an institution outside government dedicated to understanding American irregular warfare.” To Cleveland, both legislative and public pressure would fuel a change that he describes with his most explicit recommendation: to “reorganize the Executive branch around the security challenges of the 21st century.”

He outlines three options for creating an IW proponent to develop the “concepts, doctrine and canon” required to achieve greater success in PCCs. The first option: create a Cabinet-level organization modeled after the Office of Strategic Services of World War II fame. This organization would have the access and placement within the Executive branch necessary to influence the development of a US whole-of-government campaign for a given PCC. This proposal would therefore maximize the ability of the United States to achieve foreign policy goals by improving interoperability and internal coordination. If this proves untenable, his secondary proposal is to create a separate service within the Department of Defense, designed and built for IW. This would either be a new service, or a smaller service that has a subsidiary relationship with the Army, just as the Marine Corps has with the Navy. His third proposal is to divide US Special Operations Command into two separate four-star commands: one for surgical strike focused on counterterrorism and crisis response, and one for IW focused on these population-centric conflicts.

Cleveland relies on his wide-ranging experience within special operations to form these conclusions. He describes an early deployment to Bolivia to demonstrate the need for an IW proponent, recounting how the lead US Army commander in South America expressed skepticism about the ability of the Department of Defense to win an “inherently unwinnable” counterdrug mission in Bolivia. And indeed, it is difficult to see how combined arms warfare alone could achieve a military “win” for such a campaign. Cleveland suggests that a more mature and fully developed IW doctrine would be able to describe what “winning” and “losing” look like and identify potential whole-of-government campaigns within that constrained civilian environment. This conflict thus was not about dominating territory with military power, but instead about persuading, as frugally and non-violently as possible, a host nation population to reduce the amount of coca produced over extended periods of time.

The book also shows how the absence of an IW proponent is felt in missed opportunities for coordination and interoperability between different US agencies, departments, and services. Referring to his experience in Bolivia once again, Cleveland describes the fractured efforts of the US country team, and how ultimately the Ambassador and the Drug Enforcement Agency were kicked out of the country in 2008 and coca production was legalized, despite substantial amounts of US aid and training. Ideally, a dedicated proponent for IW would have been able to do a better job understanding the challenges and constraints of the local environment, help craft a cost-effective counterdrug strategy, and then aid the country team in a whole-of-government IW effort.

Building on these observations, Cleveland illustrates how the US has struggled in past PCCs to understand the local environment and develop and implement effective campaign plans to create enduring IW effects. Leaning on his experience in Iraq, Cleveland notes that the US struggled to make good policy decisions when confronted with an IW environment like the transition from conventional war to post-Baathist government in Iraq in 2003. He specifically calls out the disastrous US edict to dissolve the Iraqi Army without immediately rebuilding it. This edict created an unemployed population of proud and angry Iraqi soldiers who had lost their economic livelihood and now had powerful reasons to develop a violent insurgency against the coalition presence. An Executive Branch IW proponent would help create sensible campaigns and strategies to avoid such unnecessarily harmful outcomes, Cleveland argues.

Without proponent and mature doctrine, the US military has sometimes gotten in its own way during IW missions, Cleveland writes. He contrasts the US Special Forces’ four-month deployment cycle in Bosnia during the 1990s with the more consistent British deployment strategy. These four-month deployments meant that, three times a year, a new US Special Forces commander and unit would arrive largely ignorant of local on-the-ground realities, with a new view of the mission. That unit would then depart at the four-month mark, just as it was starting to understand the local situation and able to operate effectively with other entities and host nation authorities. By contrast, the British had a single commander to provide continuity of effort for this IW mission as units cycled through over a much longer period.

This reviewer observed one period in Afghanistan from 2010 to 2011 in which US Special Forces deliberately coordinated to deploy units back to locations in which they’d already served in order to reduce this “turbulence” and loss of local knowledge. This effort had a profoundly positive effect on US performance, especially for teams conducting the population-centric effort to build local police and governance structures through village stability operations. An IW proponent would help identify and eliminate problems such as lack of continuity in command and deployment patterns that compromise performance.

Cleveland might have strengthened his book by noting prior US successes in PCCs and diagnosing the sources of these successes. El Salvador, where Cleveland deployed several times in the late 1980s to thwart a Soviet-sponsored insurgency, is widely considered a US IW success. American efforts there helped curb and reform governmental abuses and provided sufficient time to develop and implement a political solution that dissolved the insurgency. Cleveland does note this success, but he qualifies it by arguing that the US underestimated both the amount of time and money required for that success: 12 years instead of five, and $6 billion instead of $300 million. The real motivations of the insurgents also eluded American officials, who were surprised when the insurgents agreed to the peace settlement. Cleveland concludes that El Salvador was “strategic success by accident,” lauding a congressional ceiling on the US troop footprint, which forced the host nation to resolve the conflict politically. He might have drawn a parallel here with his own experience while serving as the commander of US Special Operations Command – South during Plan Colombia, where similar congressional limitations minimized a direct US military role and encouraged political reconciliation between the Colombian government and insurgent groups. Instead, this section of his memoir focuses on hostage rescue missions and the effort to create three different IW campaign plans in South America and thus misses an opportunity to reflect on how long-term SOF engagement through Plan Colombia achieved US strategic goals in the country.

This book is intended to spur critical reflection, and then eventually improvement, in the performance of the United States in IW environments. The United States has faced significant challenges over the last 40 years in areas including stability operations, counterdrug campaigns, counterinsurgency, and counterterrorism. Conflict and competition below the threshold of declared war to influence populations will continue to be critically important to our foreign policy and national defense. Members of Congress, commanders, policy makers, and interested civilians should take this book’s recommendations to heart to begin the process of improving the American way of irregular war.

SFC Brian Nau is a Special Forces Intelligence Sergeant. He has an economics degree from the University of Puget Sound and a Master of Arts degree from American Military University. He has served in Special Forces for 12 years, including a full decade at 1st Special Forces Group, deploying nine times with six combat deployments to Iraq, the Philippines, and Afghanistan. He is completing a manuscript entitled, “The Tale of Two Strategies: Improving the Performance of the U.S. Government in Unstable Places.”

Main image: U.S. Army M113 armored personnel carriers travel on a road in Panama during Operation Just Cause in December 1989. The invasion of Panama began Dec. 20, 1989 when U.S. military forces were called to remove the regime of Manuel Noriega in Panama. (Military archive photo.)

18. Hamstrung: Sources of and Solutions for Political-Military Mismatch

Conclusion:

So long as American primacy persists and the threat spectrum remains broad and diverse, the problem of political-military mismatch will challenge modern warfighting. Military effectiveness is not a function of wholesale autonomy to wage war, like the objective model asserts. Nor is it primarily a function of being reined in from going rogue, like adherents to myopia arguments suggest. Solutions lie in incisive problem identification, a healthy hybrid model of civilian control of the military, and creative engagement. Military leaders must extensively, expertly interface with their civilian counterparts to maintain synchronicity across multilevel objectives. Commanders ought to inform and enrich civilian decision-makers, and the latter should resource and constrain the former to hold the line amid the fog, friction, and contingency of conflict.

Hamstrung: Sources of and Solutions for Political-Military Mismatch - Modern War Institute

mwi.westpoint.edu · by Kerry Chávez, J Andrés Gannon · August 28, 2023

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In an interview with Le Figaro in 2009, Afghan President Hamid Karzai lambasted the United States’ inapt military response—an airstrike—to a lone hijacked fuel tanker immobilized in a riverbed: “What an error in judgment! More than 90 dead all because of a simple lorry. . . . Why didn’t they send in ground troops to recover the tank?” Most of the casualties were civilians, drawing criticism that coalition forces were more intent on killing Taliban members than protecting the population.

Why didn’t they send in ground troops? This airstrike is illustrative of an apparent bias toward high technology in US warfighting. Such high-tech approaches are sometimes operationally inappropriate, failing to achieve or even retrogressing political objectives. We have repeatedly seen this play out in unconventional conflicts, where having troops on the ground to live with the population, provide security, and share risks is vital for winning hearts and minds in contests of political will. Yet high-tech approaches to war can also backfire in the complex operating environment of large-scale conflicts, when human perception, emotion, and motive may be more effective than sensors in distinguishing adversary from civilian (or even friendly operator).

Technology or Policy?

Scholars typically attribute this overreliance on high-tech uses of force to flaws in the military. Typecast as techno-fetishist, these approaches portray military leaders as swept up in the revolution in military affairs that promises to clear the fog of war and insulate soldiers from harm. These assumed biases animate many reproofs of the objective model of civilian control, which posits that elected officials make the political decision about when to use force and generals apolitically decide how to use it. Critics contend that, left alone, the military will forget or ignore that war is an instrument of policy, and instead pursue parochial doctrines, organizational interests, or military victory as an end in itself. Technology makes it even easier for military leaders to prosecute war without a clear or important political goal.

The implication is that civilians must intervene often in military operations to ensure that uses of force align with strategic and political goals. The recent open letter on best practices of civil-military relations published by eight former secretaries of defense and five former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff reinforces the necessity of this norm. Like most civil-military research, though, the letter fixes its corrective gaze on the military, sketching what it can and cannot, and should and should not, do. What about the civilians in civil-military dynamics? What about the effects of politics trickling across the civil-military membrane?

While we support norms of civilian control, merely making it more stringent is an insufficient solution to the problem of overreliance on and misapplication of technology. Instead, any civil-mil balance must be paired with other measures designed to shape civilian incentives in policymaking, or risk similarly ruinous outcomes where risk-averting tactics dictate strategy.

The Role of the President

Domestic constraints on political leaders, particularly in advanced democracies, can be equally if not more influential in the selection of military strategy. US presidents are distinctly poised between domestic and international cross pressures, beholden to public opinion yet duty bound to secure against foreign threats. This balancing act is easier to manage when the public is firmly behind a military intervention. Under these circumstances, public approval serves as a green light, signaling to the president that he has constituent backing and wide latitude to devote national resources to the conflict as commander-in-chief.

The nominal domestic constraints on the president translate to similarly nominal political constraints imposed on the military. With a full menu of military options on the table, commanders (in consultation with civilian principals) can optimally contour force employment to an adversary and operating environment. Ultimately, this improves the odds of victory, both military and political.

When hamstrung by low public opinion or suspicion of the use of force, executives have powerful incentives to shield the median voter from the costs of war by fielding technology over troops. To politically self-preserve, civilian leaders can truncate the military options available to only high-tech approaches that avert risks and costs that might reverberate during voting. Preoccupied by a “pervasive concern with acceptability,” political leaders veto force employment options that expose them to electoral liability. Much is known about this in the context of casualty aversion—a public averse to foreign battles soaked in American blood often succeeds in tying the president’s hands.

Political Considerations

If the conflict explicitly calls for a high-tech approach, such as a conventional array of force or infrastructure vulnerable to a standoff precision strike, political constraints from the civilian side will not prove problematic for military planning. But if the conflict requires a denser, enduring cohort of troops and the president blacklists this optimal configuration, the formation of strategy will be more contentious with commanders, and the translation to tactics more incoherent in context. Ultimately, when the constricted menu of options is ill-suited for a given mission, the military will be challenged to attain success. Charge military leaders to win such wars, and they will demand low-tech force employment where soldiers can accomplish what missiles alone cannot.

Problematically, when domestically constrained, US political leaders are loath to comply. Andrew Payne’s account of the drawdown in Iraq illustrates this well. After the 2010 midterm elections, President Barack Obama solicited proposals for a residual force. The closer his 2012 campaign came, the more he truncated the number of acceptable troops. After the White House rejected the initial proposal of twenty to twenty-four thousand troops put forward by General Lloyd Austin, commanding general of US forces in Iraq, Austin revised it down to nineteen thousand, then a “minimally acceptable” sixteen thousand, and then a “bare bones” ten thousand after repeated rejections. When it hit eight thousand, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen sent a rare memo warning the president that the mission could not be achieved. Ultimately, against the strong preferences of a strong military majority, Obama’s political incentives won out.

Thus, civilians can limit military options to high-tech approaches (Obama was labeled the “drone president” for a reason) that are not always conducive to victory. A recent study on civilian deference to the military demonstrates that presidents defer to flag officers by choice, not structure or information asymmetries, implying that civilian defiance of military wisdom is also by choice. The open letter on civil-military best practices underlines that civilian leadership has the right to be wrong, to insist on a course of action against counsel that ends up hamstringing military success.

However, Joint Chiefs chairmen and defense secretaries also asserted, in their 2022 open letter, that “civilian leaders must take responsibility for the consequences of the actions they direct.” It is in this spirit that we urge equal attention to the pressures (and pathologies) of political leaders when interpreting poor war performances. If we ignore the impact of electoral anxieties of civilian leaders, we will miscast the military as incurably stricken with bureaucratic inertia or technophilia. This will lead to flawed inferences, and ineffective prescriptions.

The open letter authors and other experts emphasize that the ideal in civil-military relations is mutual trust and rigorous, balanced exchange. Trust cast upward depends on civilian leaders authentically evaluating prudent options submitted by military authorities regardless of partisan and electoral politics. Furthermore, civilian leaders must shoulder the blame when abrading against military wisdom. Scholarship on these relations lopsidedly levies culpability for civil-military dysfunctions on the latter. We submit that political biases are upstream of any military myopia and affect far more than existing scholarship has excavated. It is high time we dig in.

Prescriptions to Supplement Civilian Control

The world is often on fire, foreign policy is hard, and no one is perfect. Especially in the age of American primacy, leaders will inevitably face cross pressures to activate military force in conflicts at infinitesimal risk and cost. Rather than hamstring victory, we offer three prescriptions to attenuate the tensions and penalties of political-military mismatch associated with an overreliance on high-tech tactics.

First, in some cases the United States should refrain from military action. Democratic constraints are normatively important to limit imperialistic impulses. Although public knowledge of foreign policy is limited and coarse, sometimes such constraints are justified. Especially when civilian leaders are electorally insecure (even more so when an election is imminent), they run a serious risk of rejecting reasonable wisdom out of a motivated bias to self-preserve in power. Importantly, this restraint should not just manifest in difference in form—lobbing munitions overseas is still a military action with consequences. Although certainly weighed against costs of inaction, sometimes military force should be held in reserve rather than deployed in suboptimal configurations to American detriment.

Second, American leaders should look to engage partners in multilateral formats. If intervention is necessary and proper unilateral use of force is too politically expensive for domestic reasons, risks and costs might be shared. Not only does this redistribute burdens, but it also imbues military interventions with more legitimacy as another state endorses the action to the point of participation. We submit that this might be a useful screening mechanism for our first prescription. If public and partners’ wills are hollow for a given campaign, restraint is reinforced. If partners are willing to enter the fray, however, cost-benefit calculus is redrawn across both domains.

A final option is to outsource costs and risks to private military companies, especially for missions that take more time to accomplish such as counterinsurgency, peacekeeping, or security sector reform and support. To be clear, we are not advocating irresponsible applications of force that bypass scrutiny or accountability. Private military force has comparable prowess and professionalism, yet by toggling to a commercial logic it has more staying power than state militaries. When shrewdly contracted and monitored for mission creep, these groups can endure in unconventional conflicts to a degree and for a duration that makes a difference. If public will is wanting and military intervention is truly warranted, private military companies might supplement or stand in for state force to facilitate security and stability.

A Clear-Eyed Civ-Mil Balance

So long as American primacy persists and the threat spectrum remains broad and diverse, the problem of political-military mismatch will challenge modern warfighting. Military effectiveness is not a function of wholesale autonomy to wage war, like the objective model asserts. Nor is it primarily a function of being reined in from going rogue, like adherents to myopia arguments suggest. Solutions lie in incisive problem identification, a healthy hybrid model of civilian control of the military, and creative engagement. Military leaders must extensively, expertly interface with their civilian counterparts to maintain synchronicity across multilevel objectives. Commanders ought to inform and enrich civilian decision-makers, and the latter should resource and constrain the former to hold the line amid the fog, friction, and contingency of conflict.

Kerry Chávez, PhD, is an instructor in the Political Science Department and project administrator at the Peace, War, and Social Conflict Laboratory at Texas Tech University. She is also a nonresident research fellow with the Modern War Institute at West Point.

J Andrés Gannon, PhD, is a Stanton Nuclear Security fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a nonresident fellow at the Eurasia Group Foundation. Previously, he was an International Security Program postdoctoral research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, a Hans J. Morgenthau research fellow at the Notre Dame International Security Center, and a PhD Eisenhower Defence fellow at the NATO Defence College.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.

Image credit: Sgt. Fredrick J. Coleman, US Marine Corps

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mwi.westpoint.edu · by Kerry Chávez, J Andrés Gannon · August 28, 2023

19. America Is Often a Nation Divided by Karl Rove

Excerpts:

So what ended these periods of broken politics? Convulsive events such as World War II played a role. More important, adroit leadership—the kind we saw with Jefferson, Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan—clearly mattered. They set a tone that led to healing.

But most of the credit goes to the American people, who make mistakes but have always found their way back to true north. They have often tolerated our country’s politics being angry, hyperpartisan and divisive; in some instances, they are the driving force behind polarization, with the political class reflecting the public’s unchecked passions. But that lasts only for a season. Their good common sense eventually brings them to vote for change, determined to reshape our politics in healthier, more constructive ways.

Polls show a clear majority of voters are unhappy with today’s politics, its ugly practices and the front-runners offered for 2024. So don’t grow weary or discouraged. It’s bad today, but it’s been worse before, and it will be better ahead. Change is coming. We don’t know precisely when, but it’s coming. The better angels of our nature as Americans will emerge and win out.

America Is Often a Nation Divided

U.S. politics today is ugly and broken, true enough. But the good news is that it was worse in the past, and it will get better again.

By Karl Rove

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Aug. 25, 2023 3:03 pm ET

https://www.wsj.com/articles/america-is-often-a-nation-divided-politics-election-gop-voters-debate-unrest-9100042a?utm

A protester holding a ‘Stop The War’ flag at an anti-Vietnam War demonstration in Chicago, August 1968. PHOTO: ROLLS PRESS/POPPERFOTO VIA GETTY IMAGES

America is deeply divided. Our politics is broken, marked by anger, contempt and distrust. We must acknowledge that reality but not lose historical perspective. It’s bad now, but it’s been worse before—and not only during the Civil War.

Let’s look backward and start with the mid-1960s to early ’70s. The nation was bitterly divided over civil rights, the “sexual revolution” and an increasingly unpopular war in Southeast Asia.

The just and peaceful civil-rights protests of the 1950s and early ’60s were often met with state-sanctioned violence. Then Harlem exploded in 1964, followed by a riot in Philadelphia. Watts went up in flames in 1965; Chicago, Cleveland and San Francisco the next year. A total of 163 cities—including Atlanta, Boston, Buffalo, Cincinnati, Detroit, Milwaukee, Newark, N.J., New York and Portland, Ore.—suffered widespread violence in the “Long Hot Summer” of 1967. On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tenn. Riots broke out in more than 130 American cities, with 47 killed in the ensuing violence. Two months later Robert Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles.

That same year the nation’s most prominent segregationist, George Wallace, running for president as an independent, won five states in the Deep South. In 1972 he came in third for the Democratic nomination, 1.8 points behind the winner in total primary vote.

Beginning in 1965, the country was rocked by demonstrations over the Vietnam War, many of them student-led. In some instances, governors sent in the National Guard to restore order. After guardsmen killed four students in 1970 at Ohio’s Kent State, protests broke out on 350 campuses, involving an estimated two million people. Thirty-five thousand antiwar protesters assaulted the Pentagon in October 1967. An estimated 10,000 tried shutting down the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Four years later, thousands tried the same at the GOP convention in Miami Beach. The U.S. experienced more than 2,500 domestic bombings in 18 months in 1971-72.

Two presidents were driven from office during this period. Lyndon B. Johnson opted against seeking re-election in 1968 because of the war. Richard Nixon, facing impeachment over Watergate, resigned in 1974.

In the early 1930s, 1 in 4 Americans was unemployed. Populism emerged on both ends of the spectrum. On the left, Huey Long, proclaimed “every man a king,” threatened confiscation of wealth, and preached class hatred until he was assassinated in 1935. On the right, Father Charles Coughlin, the “Radio Priest,” blamed the Depression on bankers and Jews in nationwide broadcasts from Detroit. Journalist Eric Sevareid recalled that in 1933 “every day the headlines spoke of riots, of millions thrown out of work, of mass migrations by the desperate.” Historian Wendy L. Wall describes the late 1930s as “marked by sit-down strikes, violent repression of workers, and attacks by vigilante groups on Jews, Catholics, racial minorities, and leftists.”

The Gilded Age is often overlooked as a time of division, but Republicans and Democrats hated each other. They were still fighting the Civil War by political means. President Ulysses S. Grant’s 1872 re-election was followed by five consecutive presidential contests in which no winner received a popular-vote majority. Less than 1 percentage point separated the two candidates in three elections. In two of the five races, the winning candidate failed to earn a plurality of popular vote because the black Republican vote was suppressed by violence hard for modern minds to grasp.

The most notorious of these Gilded Age elections was 1876. Democrat Samuel Tilden led Republican Rutherford Hayes by 252,666 votes nationwide, but disputes about the Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina results were settled on March 2, 1877, by a special commission that awarded their electoral votes to Hayes. He was inaugurated two days later and, in return for a meaningless pledge by the South to protect black rights, he withdrew the remaining federal troops from the region. The Electoral College count was 185-184.

From 1873 until 1897, Republicans held the White House and the Senate and House for four years; Democrats for two years. That left 18 years of divided government. When Democrats flipped 92 seats to win the House in 1874 for the first time in 18 years, it was part of what historian Michael Perman calls “The Return of the Bourbons” as 56 former Confederates, including the former vice president of the Confederacy, were elected to Congress from Southern and border states.

In the Gilded Age, it was routine for the House majority of either party to phony up a challenge to a member of the opposition who’d won by a few votes and toss him out, no matter how flimsy the evidence. This happened 62 times between 1874 and 1904. After winning re-election in 1882 by eight votes, Rep. William McKinley of Ohio was expelled by the Democratic majority.

This constant abuse of the House minority by the majority helped lead each party to take extreme measures. In 1888 Republicans won the White House with Benjamin Harrison and held the Senate by one seat and the House by four, 164-160 with one vacancy. If more than four Republican representatives were absent during a floor vote, House Democrats would demand a roll call and refuse to answer when their names were called. The measure would fail for lack of a quorum. The Democrats’ “disappearing quorum” kept the House from acting for months.

Finally, on Jan. 29, 1890, Speaker Thomas Reed had enough. He brought up an election challenge to a West Virginia Democrat who’d been certified the victor. The Republican had led by three votes until the Democratic governor “interpreted” one precinct’s report of two Democratic votes as 12, making the Democrat the winner by seven.

After Republicans narrowly prevailed on the motion to take up the issue, Democrats demanded a roll call and then remained silent, not answering to their names. There were enough Republicans missing that the House lacked a quorum. Reed then declared: “The chair directs the clerk to record the following names of members present and refusing to vote” and called out enough Democrats on the floor to establish a quorum. Democrats tried fleeing the chamber, but the doors were blocked.

An angry Democrat rose to complain, screaming, “I deny your right, Mr. Speaker, to count me present” to which Reed calmly replied: “The chair is making a statement of the fact that the gentleman from Kentucky is present. Does he deny it?”

The floor debate over Reed’s action raged on for two more days. The second day, Texas Rep. William “Howdy” Martin called on fellow Democrats to order him to remove Reed by force. The speaker ignored him. Martin, who’d fought in the Civil War with the Hood’s Brigade, then stood near the podium, heckling the speaker as Rep. William Bynum (D., Ind.) assailed Reed from the floor. The speaker kept ignoring Martin, causing him to retreat, muttering that Reed had “no fight in him.” The next day, Martin sat in front of the rostrum, pulled out his Bowie knife, and sharpened it on his boot sole to menace Reed. The speaker continued ignoring him, the controversy ebbed, and when Democrats took control of the House after that fall’s election, they reluctantly adopted Reed’s rule against the “disappearing quorum” rather than preside over a deadlocked House.

South Carolina Rep. Preston Brooks beating abolitionist Massachusetts Sen. Charles Sumner in the U.S. Senate chamber, 1856. PHOTO: NEW YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY/GETTY IMAGES

There were bitter divisions and acrimony in the 1850s. Remember the caning of Massachusetts Sen. Charles Sumner by South Carolina Rep. Preston Brooks in 1856? It was condemned in the North and cheered in the South. Historian Joanne Freeman writes in “Field of Blood” that this violent period in the Capitol began in the 1830s and lasted for decades. Senators and representatives routinely carried pistols, knives, clubs, brass knuckles and other weapons onto the floor. Political tensions ran high; insults and confrontations were routine and violence frequent. There was even death. In 1838, Whig Rep. William Graves of Kentucky shot and killed Democratic Rep. Jonathan Cilley of Maine in a duel over charges of corruption.

Ms. Freeman argues that “extreme polarization and the breakdown of debate” in Congress meant that the “structures of government and the bonds of Union were eroding in real time,” leading to “the collapse of our national civic structure to the point of crisis. The nation didn’t slip into disunion; it fought its way into it.” It sounds a bit like today, but are our present disagreements as large as those over the antebellum era’s central question—what shall be done about the enslavement of nearly four million human beings?

These decades of animus followed America’s first claim of a stolen presidential election. Andrew Jackson led in 1824’s four-way race with 41% of the popular vote and carried 11 states, but with 99 electoral votes came up 33 short of a majority. The contest went to the House, with each state’s delegation having one vote. On Feb. 9, 1825, the House seated John Quincy Adams—the runner-up with 84 electoral votes—with 13 states to seven for Jackson and four for Treasury Secretary William Crawford. Jackson and his supporters raged at Adams and Speaker Henry Clay, who led his followers into the Adams camp and was later made secretary of state. The “rights of the people have been bartered for promises of office,” Jackson wrote. He spent the next four years condemning the “corrupt bargain” that “operated to deprive the people of their right of free election” and defeated Adams in 1828.

The 1800 election, between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, was among the most acrimonious in the nation’s history. Historian James Roger Sharp writes that “vicious personal attacks, portents of doom and disaster if one or another of the opponents were to be elected, and scurrilous rumors of betrayal and intrigue pervaded every aspect of the contest.” Each side believed the other’s election “would threaten the very existence of the republic.” This wasn’t fanciful partisan rhetoric: There was “real potential for violence and the possible disintegration of the union.”

The Electoral College vote was a 73-73 tie—not between Jefferson and incumbent Adams but between Jefferson and his running mate, Aaron Burr. Before the 12th Amendment, each elector cast two votes and the runner-up became vice president. At least one elector was supposed to throw away his second vote so that Jefferson would finish ahead of Burr. None did.

The race went to the House, with nine states required for victory. Burr appeared on the verge of being elected president with backing of the Federalists, who dominated the lame-duck Congress. The House met Feb. 11 in a blinding snowstorm and failed repeatedly to reach a majority, despite voting 27 times before noon the next day. The House was deadlocked for five days. The stalemate was finally broken by the intervention of Jefferson’s nemesis Alexander Hamilton. He’d earlier written Federalist Rep. James Bayard of Delaware that while he hated both men, at least Jefferson was concerned about “his own reputation” while Burr was a “man of extreme & irregular ambition.” If Federalists made Burr president, Hamilton wrote, they “must share in the blame and disgrace” of his failures that would surely follow.

On Feb. 17, after receiving assurances that Jefferson would expand the Navy and keep friends in their government jobs, Bayard withdrew Delaware’s vote from Burr and cast a blank ballot. He encouraged Federalist colleagues from Vermont, Maryland and South Carolina not to vote, giving Jefferson 10 states, with South Carolina joining Delaware in abstaining. It was Feb. 17 and the 36th ballot—21 more ballots than were needed to make Kevin McCarthy speaker earlier this year. The author of the Declaration of Independence was sworn in as the third president 15 days later. His vice president, Burr, killed Hamilton in an 1804 duel.

So what ended these periods of broken politics? Convulsive events such as World War II played a role. More important, adroit leadership—the kind we saw with Jefferson, Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan—clearly mattered. They set a tone that led to healing.

But most of the credit goes to the American people, who make mistakes but have always found their way back to true north. They have often tolerated our country’s politics being angry, hyperpartisan and divisive; in some instances, they are the driving force behind polarization, with the political class reflecting the public’s unchecked passions. But that lasts only for a season. Their good common sense eventually brings them to vote for change, determined to reshape our politics in healthier, more constructive ways.

Polls show a clear majority of voters are unhappy with today’s politics, its ugly practices and the front-runners offered for 2024. So don’t grow weary or discouraged. It’s bad today, but it’s been worse before, and it will be better ahead. Change is coming. We don’t know precisely when, but it’s coming. The better angels of our nature as Americans will emerge and win out.

Mr. Rove, a Journal columnist, helped organize the political-action committee American Crossroads and is author of “The Triumph of William McKinley” (Simon & Schuster, 2015).

Copyright ©2023 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Appeared in the August 26, 2023, print edition as 'America Is Often a Nation Divided'.

20. Why China Could Soon Invade Taiwan

Why China Could Soon Invade Taiwan

Biden, unfortunately, has been openly appeasing China in the last several months, and that might give Xi the idea that the U.S. would not defend Taiwan, at least before January 20, 2025.

19fortyfive.com · by Gordon Chang · August 26, 2023

When Will China Invade Taiwan? – Xi Jinping cannot stop talking about war, he is fast preparing China’s civilians and military for it, and he demands that Taiwan submit to his communist state.

As the Chinese foreign ministry declared on the 15th of this month, Taiwan is “the core of the core interests of China.”

The people of Taiwan, who mostly do not view themselves as “Chinese,” will not agree to Xi annexing their homeland, so he will have to take the island republic by force if he is to rule it.

That raises one of the most important questions in the world today: When will China invade?

China’s Taiwan Attack Plan

Xi, as President Joe Biden said in off-the-cuff remarks in June, is a “dictator.” Does China’s dictator have, inside the Communist Party, sufficient power to order an invasion on his own?

That’s not clear.

Nonetheless, he can, I think, eventually get what he wants when it comes to Taiwan.

There are for Xi, from all we can tell, three principal sets of considerations as to timing of an attack: the electoral calendar in the U.S., internal political developments in Taiwan, and his timetable based on China’s domestic situation.

It’s hard to figure out what is the most important factor for the ambitious Chinese leader.

As an initial matter, Taiwan politics could be inhibiting Xi for the moment. Taiwan holds its next presidential election on January 13, 2024.

Vice President Lai Ching-te of the Democratic Progressive Party is leading by 16.8 points in a recent poll.

Lai is in front in large part because the opposition is divided among two declared candidates—Hou Yu-ih of the Kuomintang and Ko Wen-je of the Taiwan People’s Party—and a potential candidate from a third camp, Terry Gou. Undoubtedly, Beijing hopes the three China-friendly camps can decide on a single candidate to oppose Lai, who favors a strong and independent Taiwan.

An invasion, therefore, is unlikely until the opposition candidates sort themselves out. Should, however, Beijing believe that Lai will win, Xi will almost certainly ramp up pressure on the island in a last-ditch effort to sway voters.

As one observer said, the Chinese want Taiwan to “fear war.” A Lai win, which would certainly be a victory for the free world, might convince Xi to invade.

On the other hand, Xi undoubtedly thinks he can push around Biden.

Biden, unfortunately, has been openly appeasing China in the last several months, and that might give Xi the idea that the U.S. would not defend Taiwan, at least before January 20, 2025.

That’s not a good look for the U.S. Xi’s recent purge of the two senior officers of the Rocket Force, the branch of the People’s Liberation Army controlling almost all of the country’s nuclear weapons, suggests he wants to threaten the use of nukes to get a weak-looking Biden to stand down.

The last factor is internal. “My assessment is that Xi Jinping is not influenced by external timetables, whether the Taiwan or U.S. election cycles,” Steve Yates, chair of the China Policy Initiative of the America First Policy Institute, told 1945. “He is driven by his own vision for a modern cultural and geopolitical revolution that keeps the Communist Party in power and attacks its enemies.”

As Yates sees it, “China crumbling economic system is the greatest threat to Xi and his chosen mission.”

China’s economy and financial system are showing signs of severe stress. Big property companies, the mainstays of the economy, are defaulting; the currency is plunging; stock prices are falling; investors are pulling money out of the country; businesses are leaving Chinese soil.

On the 10th of this month, Biden at a Democratic Party fundraiser in Utah proclaimed that “China is in trouble.” At least Xi Jinping and the Communist Party are. Biden correctly called the country “a ticking time bomb.” “They have got some problems,” the President said. “That’s not good, because when bad folks have problems, they do bad things.”

Xi Jinping is as bad as they come, especially in China. He is being blamed for the deteriorating situation, and because he has amassed almost unprecedented power he has no one else to hold accountable. Moreover, during his rule he has substantially increased the cost of losing political struggles.

China’s ruler, therefore, must have a low threshold of risk. In other words, he now has incentives to act recklessly.

Xi Jinping will soon have to make a choice. He can either let alarming internal developments take him down and end the rule of the Communist Party or he can rally the Chinese people with a war.

China is not ready to go to war, but in a perverse way that actually increases the chances of Xi Jinping starting one.

Why? Xi can see that America is unprepared because Biden thinks that an unprepared China will not go into battle. There is, as everyone can see, a lack of sense of urgency in the Oval Office and among the senior ranks at the Pentagon.

New Taiwan F-16V fighter jet. Image Credit: ROC government.

What Biden does not realize is that the Communist Party may decide, for various reasons, to go to war when it is not ready.

“For the past 40 years, China’s Communist Party has been preparing for brutal war, and now the ruling organization is accelerating its plans,” Richard Fisher of the International Assessment and Strategy Center told me recently.

Yes, China can take America by surprise, and now a desperate regime has reasons to do so.

About Gordon Chang, A 19FortyFive Contributing Editor, and Author of This Article

Gordon G. Chang is the author of The Coming Collapse of China and China Is Going to War. Follow him on X, formerly Twitter, @GordonGChang.

19fortyfive.com · by Gordon Chang · August 26, 2023

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com