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Quotes of the Day:
“Humility is the foundation of all virtues, Fort allows us to approach every situation with an open mind, and a willingness to learn from others.”
- Marcus Aurelius.
“The path to wisdom is paved with humility, openness to new ideas, and a willingness to challenge one's own beliefs.”
- Socrates.
"Do not look back in anger, or forward in fear, but around in awareness."
- James Thurber
1. 'There Are Options for Israel That Do Not Involve Killing Thousands of Civilians' (interview with Josh Paul, former State Dept civil servant)
2. After Hamas, Then What? Israel's Undefined Endgame in Gaza
3. US military has more work to do integrating women, report finds
4. A sniper’s rifle, the subject of a lesson at a sniper school in Ukraine.
5. Video Analysis Shows Gaza Hospital Hit By Failed Rocket Meant for Israel
6. Inside the Commando Raids Unnerving Russia in Crimea
7. Documents found on fighters reveal Hamas capabilities, bloody plans
8. Biden hitches Israel aid to less popular Ukraine war support
9. Ukraine celebrates spectacular debut of ATACMS by playing Neil Diamond's 'Hello Again' over images of US missiles in action
10. US-China relations have stabilized, but in permafrost
11. Ukraine’s Counteroffensive Is More Successful Than You Think
12. Why China And India’s Populism Threatens The World Order
1. 'There Are Options for Israel That Do Not Involve Killing Thousands of Civilians' (interview with Josh Paul, former State Dept civil servant)
'There Are Options for Israel That Do Not Involve Killing Thousands of Civilians'
By NAHAL TOOSI
10/20/2023 12:20 PM EDT
Politico · by Colin Woodard
‘There Are Options for Israel That Do Not Involve Killing Thousands of Civilians’
A now-former U.S. official explains why he resigned rather than pave the way for more arms transfers to Israel as it battles Hamas.
"There has to be a political solution, and the military means move us further away from the political solution," said Josh Paul, who quit his position in the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs. | Abed Khaled/AP
10/20/2023 12:20 PM EDT
Until this week, Josh Paul was a figure little-known beyond diplomatic and military circles. He had spent more than 11 years at the State Department as a civil servant, focusing heavily on the issue of arms transfers from the United States to other countries. He’d watched as the United States sent weapons to many troublesome regimes, but he thought his input had helped keep the system from thoughtless overreach.
The U.S. rush to arm Israel in its battle against Hamas militants proved a breaking point for Paul. The 45-year-old, an American who grew up in London and speaks with a distinctive British accent, quit his position in the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs. He posted a resignation letter that he said resonated with many inside the State Department. In it, he condemned the Hamas attack as a “monstrosity” but wrote that he believes the military response Israel is taking will only lead to more and greater suffering.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is an issue Paul has studied academically, writing a master’s thesis on Israeli counterterrorism and civil rights, and he has also lived in the West Bank. In a conversation with POLITICO Magazine, Paul laid out why he thinks the U.S. approach to this war is wrongheaded and why Israel should pursue options beyond an invasion of the Gaza Strip. He even read some excerpts of the emails he sent to his former superiors.
This conversation has been edited for clarity.
Nahal Toosi: Have you received more negative or more positive responses to your resignation?
Josh Paul: Overwhelmingly more positive. I’ve been really surprised and touched by the outreach I’ve received from both colleagues, or former colleagues, I guess, across the interagency and in the legislative branch, as well as just strangers who’ve reached out. It’s been really moving.
Toosi: And what have they been saying?
Paul: What struck me the most about the outreach, particularly from colleagues, is that I didn’t expect there would be much. This issue and criticism of Israel tends to be a bit of a third rail. And I thought people would want to stay as far away from it as they can. But so many colleagues have reached out to say, “We understand where you’re coming from. We support you. We feel the same way. This is really difficult, and we’re really struggling with this, too.” And that’s been really significant. Really eye opening. And then there’s just people around the world just saying nice things, which is also encouraging.
Toosi: What was the tipping point for you these last several days? Did something specific happen? Was there a particular moment of clarity?
Paul: It wasn’t a specific moment. I’ve been watching events since the horrors of Oct. 7 and participating, of course, in the State Department and interagency discussions about how to respond, what we would do. Over that period, I just saw the lack of debate. Normally when we have controversial arms transfer decisions, those are hashed out intensively and sometimes over a period of weeks or months, or sometimes even years. There just wasn’t any space for that sort of discussion. I attempted it on a number of occasions, in emails and conversations and discussions and meetings. But there was no response, just, “OK, got it. Let’s move on. We’re doing this.”
Seeing that and recognizing that also, unlike with previous controversial arms transfers, where Congress has had a bite at the apple and has held cases or has debated cases, or has voted on cases, there also wouldn’t be a space for debate in the congressional sphere, I realized that the only opportunity to raise this issue and to press it was in the public sphere and that required me standing down.
Toosi: Weren’t you also on some pre-planned leave at the time?
Paul: I was on leave, but since Covid, leave hasn’t really meant leave. We all telework, and I was constantly on email, on the phone. There was a degree of distance, which was, I think, was quite helpful for me because it allowed me to stand back and see everything that was going on with a bit of perspective, but I was not at all left out of the discussions.
Toosi: Did you make the arguments that you lay out in your letter internally before quitting? And did you consider other methods to voice your disagreement, such as the State Department’s dissent channel?
Paul: Yeah. As early as, I think it was the Monday after Hamas’ attacks, I sent out an email to a number of folks in leadership positions and said we need to think about this and, rather than rushing to provide security assistance, think about why this hasn’t worked in the past and what we can do differently this time. And we should not rush to provide military equipment, but we should take a more thoughtful stance.
That was met with — well, from some colleagues, offline words of agreement, but with no substantive response and everything just moved forward. And then over the course of the week, I raised the point again, on a number of calls with colleagues, including bureau leadership. I didn’t participate in a dissent channel in this instance. I find the dissent channel an important channel, but not a particularly effective one.
Toosi: When you were saying, ‘We need to be more thoughtful about this,’ what was the argument you were making as to why we need to be more thoughtful about this?
Paul: If you’ll bear with me, I’ll refresh my memory by bringing up my email. If I can quote to you?
Toosi: Yes, please.
Paul: I said, “It’s been clear for decades that the only route to that future” — that future being peace — “is not through military victory, but through diplomatic compromise, not through creating fear, but through building trust, not through killing enemies, but through making friends, not through imposing suffering, but through inspiring hope. On all these counts, what is happening now in Israel is a tragedy not only for lives it is taking and also for the future, whose possibility it is foreclosing upon for yet another generation. … In this conflict everyone loses, and the longer it lasts, the greater the losses will be.”
Toosi: This is what you were telling your superiors in your email?
Paul: Yeah.
Toosi: That’s the email you sent them?
Paul: Yes. “I know this is an unpopular opinion and too soon, but maybe the best thing for Israel right now is not security assistance in the sort of volume that makes them think they can afford to just ignore the Palestinian question and hope that, cordoned off, it will go away. Or to put it another way, if we weren’t giving them billions a year for decades, is it more or less likely they would have found it in their interest for the Oslo process to work and we wouldn’t be where we are today.”
Toosi: You wrote that in an email to your bosses?
Paul: Yeah. They’re used to it.
Toosi: You mean you’ve made these arguments before?
Paul: Yes, and not just on Israel. On a host of controversial arms transfers with partners that are difficult.
Toosi: And their reaction this time was, “Thanks. We’re moving on.”
Paul: Yup. Exactly.
Toosi: Could you tell me who you sent the emails to?
Paul: I’d rather not single out individuals.
Toosi: Did the secretary of State … ?
Paul: No. The secretary of State was not one of those.
Toosi: Over the years, you’ve helped facilitate arm sales to many regimes with poor human rights records. Why is Israel different? Is it worse than Egypt, worse than Saudi Arabia?
Paul: No. I’m not making an argument that Israel is worse than Egypt, worse than Saudi Arabia. You said I’ve facilitated many arms sales to that sort of regime. I would say I’ve hindered and delayed many arms sales to that sort of regime. The fundamental difference here is that there was no appetite, no opportunity, no space for that sort of policy discussion, which can have a difference. It can draw out the timelines, it can introduce opportunities to mitigate arms sales. There’s just none of that here.
Toosi: But just to be clear, is Israel different from Egypt or Saudi or elsewhere? I mean, are they different in terms of how they use our weaponry?
Paul: I mean, every unhappy country is unhappy in its own way. It’s a fundamentally different situation. The people the Saudis are hurting the most are the Saudis, the people the Egyptians are hurting the most are the Egyptians. The people the Israelis are hurting is not the Israelis.
It is a different situation in that regard and in many others, but I’m not going to quantify degrees of awfulness.
Toosi: In your letter explaining your resignation, you wrote that the Biden administration’s approach has been “an impulsive reaction built on confirmation bias, political convenience, intellectual bankruptcy and bureaucratic inertia.” Can you further explain what you mean by that?
Paul: So obviously impulsive, right, because it was a response to the horrific — make no bones about that — absolutely horrific, horrendous Hamas attack. That’s the impulsive aspect.
The confirmation bias — we always talk about Israel has a right to defend itself. And let’s provide Israel with the Iron Dome, which by the way, I entirely support. They should not have to live under rocket fire.
But we never turned it around and think about the threat to Palestinians from Israeli incursions into their villages in the West Bank on a constant basis, from bombardment from Israel against homes in Gaza, or housing demolitions in the West Bank. We always approach this problem from one perspective, and I think that’s part of the problem.
Political convenience? I think the Biden administration doesn’t want a battle with Republicans in particular, but also internal to the Democratic Party about Israel and are we pro-Israel enough and who’s the most pro-Israel?
Intellectual bankruptcy in the sense that we’ve seen for over 20 years that the commitment we made to Israel of security for peace, essentially, has not led to security or peace and in fact, leads to insecurity and makes peace further away.
Bureaucratic inertia? Well, it’s Israel. Let’s move it. Inertia in the sense that this is what we always do, so let’s keep doing it. Rather than thinking, pausing, discussing.
Toosi: What is the alternative? Stop arming Israel? You yourself denounced what Hamas did as a monstrosity of monstrosities. Wouldn’t tempering support for Israel only give Hamas and other extremists more incentive to attack again?
Paul: No. There are several aspects here. There is first of all a broader political question — this approach has not worked. Honestly, you hear Netanyahu and Israel talking about “This is going to be a military operation to destroy Hamas.” Maybe you can destroy the organization of Hamas, but you cannot destroy what Hamas is and sort of the resistance that it represents through military means. There has to be a political solution, and the military means move us further away from the political solution.
That said, Israel certainly has the capability to take out the al-Qassam Brigades and the leaders of Hamas. It has demonstrated this capability. We’ve seen various Israeli operations from the assassination of Yahya Ayyash, with the cellphone, to the poisoning in Amman of a Hamas’ leader to Israel’s response to the 1972 Olympics, where it said that it would hunt down and kill everyone who had taken part in that, and it did.
So there are options for Israel that do not involve displacing 600,000 civilians. There are options for Israel that do not involve killing thousands of civilians. I don’t know how many Palestinian civilians have to die per Israeli civilian killed, but I think there are other ways of doing this that are actually more productive for Israel’s own interests.
Toosi: You actually know a lot about this conflict. You’ve seen this issue up close, having lived in Ramallah and establishing connections with both Israelis and Palestinians. What aspect of it do you think more people need to understand?
Paul: I think most people would say the historical context, but I don’t think that’s right. I think what more people need to understand is the day-to-day experience of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, which are very different from each other but horrible in their own ways.
People need to understand that there are just a lot of innocent human beings, civilians, on both sides. In fact, the majorities of both populations just want to live in peace, just want to live their lives, raise their families.
It’s not that simple, of course. But I think people don’t grasp the day-to-day realities, and tend to only see one side of the conflict, because that’s the side that’s easy to access, that is media savvy, that is in many ways more relatable from an American perspective.
Toosi: If this does become a regional war — one that involves, say, Iran — doesn’t the United States have an obligation to militarily support its allies?
Paul: That’s a separate question, right? Now you’re not talking about security assistance in the way that I have been in terms of arms transfers. You’re talking about U.S. military involvement.
Toosi: Let’s limit it to arms transfers, because that’s what you know. Shouldn’t we be doing this because of the threat of regional war as well? This is not just a deterrent for Hamas, it’s a deterrent for Iran, etc.
Paul: Well, first of all, we’ve done that. The Biden administration has done that effectively by sending, it looks like two carrier strike groups to the Eastern Mediterranean. That sends a deterrent message to Hezbollah and to Iran.
When we talk about arms transfers what arms are we talking about? Are we talking about firearms? Are we talking about joint direct attack munitions, are we talking about small diameter bombs? Because each of those is very different sort of target sets. What units are we talking about? Are we talking about units with a track record of civilian casualties? Or are we talking about the units that have a track record of being more discriminatory? Are we talking about units that are involved in long-range strike capabilities, or are we talking about units that are involved in cross-border attacks? There’s a lot of complexity that goes into it. If that’s the question, then those need to be discussed rather than again, just saying, carte blanche, “Here’s everything you want.”
Toosi: What’s your advice to the Biden administration then about how it should move forward on this crisis?
Paul: Specifically to the arms transfer issue, I would encourage the Biden administration to heed its own policies. They issued the Conventional Arms Transfer Policy of this administration in February, which raises the standard — to its credit — for the consideration of human rights in arms exports, including saying that we will not authorize the transfer of arms when it is more likely than not that they will be used for violations of international humanitarian law, international law and various other human rights violations. There’s a track record when it comes to Israel and Gaza, of them being used for purposes that they were not provided. And I encourage the Biden administration to hold itself to its own standard, which it does everywhere else in the world.
More broadly, there has to be a push for a political solution. There is an acute military aspect to this, but there’s not a military solution. And the displacement of hundreds of thousands, the collective punishment of the Palestinians, a sort of a tightening of the noose does not get Israel its safety, its security. We have a responsibility, as a friend of Israel, to point this out to them and to lean on them.
Toosi: You’re an American citizen who grew up in London. Does that background give you a different perspective on this issue then many of your colleagues at the State Department?
Paul: No. As I said, I’ve been surprised and really moved by how many colleagues have reached out to me and said we’re with you, and we feel the same way. There are a lot of people who do feel the same way. And they have grown up in Kansas or wherever it might be.
Toosi: What’s next for you?
Paul: Well, for now, I don’t know what the long term is. But I’ll keep advocating on this issue in the immediate term, and we’ll see what comes.
POLITICO
Politico · by Colin Woodard
2. After Hamas, Then What? Israel's Undefined Endgame in Gaza
Excerpts:
That Israel hasn't articulated an endgame worries those with even a cursory sense of recent history in the Middle East. One need look no further than the American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. “There is the fear of a slippery slope,” al-Omari says. “You break it, you own it.” That's why longtime diplomats argue that military might alone is unlikely to solve Israel’s problems in Gaza. It will also need statecraft. “You can't treat the use of force as an end in itself,” says Ross. “There has to be a focus on what is the political result of this.”
Unfortunately, few see hope for a positive outcome from a sustained victory by Israel over Hamas. “We don't have better and bad scenarios, or better and bad options,” says Avi Isaacharoff, a veteran Israeli journalist and Middle East analyst who co-created the series Fauda. “What we're facing is somewhere in between the bad, the worse, and the worst.”
After Hamas, Then What? Israel's Undefined Endgame in Gaza
BY ERIC CORTELLESSAOCTOBER 20, 2023 7:59 PM EDT
TIME
For years, Israel assiduously avoided an all-out military confrontation with Hamas, estimating that it was safer to have a contained Palestinian power controlling Gaza than no power at all. To that end, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the nation’s security establishment sought to limit the threat posed by the group via periodic strikes in a cycle that became so routine the Israelis simply called it “mowing the grass.”
Now, in the wake of the Oct. 7 massacre by Hamas that killed more than 1,500 people and upended that strategy, Israel is looking to tear Hamas out of Gaza root and branch in what most expect will be a long and bloody ground invasion. Over the last week, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have called up more than 300,000 reservists, amassed troops along the border, launched an air campaign, and conducted localized raids that have killed at least three Hamas leaders. On Thursday, Netanyahu met with troops in southern Israel. “At the end of this,” says Mark Regev, a former senior adviser to Netanyahu, Hamas' "military machine will be dismantled and its political structure will be smashed.”
Israel’s declaration of total war against Hamas is understandable after the worst slaughter of Jewish civilians since the Holocaust. Israel’s leaders reason that if Hamas is not defeated decisively, the message to hostile powers in the Middle East will be that terror tactics work. But war breeds chaos and chaos breeds unforeseen consequences. The hard question now being quietly raised by officials in Israel, the region, and the U.S. is: After Hamas, then what?
The Israelis have yet to articulate a vision or strategy for what a post-Hamas Gaza would look like. “It's too early to talk about this as far as we're concerned,” a senior Israeli official tells TIME. “The focus is on fighting and winning the war right now. What happens the day after, in any case, will take quite a while.”
But by creating a power vacuum in Gaza, Israel risks unleashing a wave of instability and disorder that could have far-reaching impact. Radicalized Palestinians could launch a sustained, asymmetric war against IDF troops in Gaza and civilians in Israel. Outside militant groups could use post-war chaos in Gaza to recruit and grow. Regional powers like Egypt and Saudi Arabia could isolate Israel amid the upheaval while enemies like Syria and Iran could be emboldened to ignite new proxy attacks. “The time to be thinking about the day after is not when you get there,” says Dennis Ross, a former Mideast peace negotiator who served in multiple U.S. administrations. “It’s before you get there.”
Amid the scenes of destruction unfolding in Gaza, it is not hard to imagine what the day after a declared Israeli victory could look like. The streets of Gaza City, Jabalia, and Khan Younis reduced to rubble. Tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians killed in the Israeli campaign. Even more Palestinians displaced from their homes and suffering a human catastrophe that few in the west can contemplate.
What comes next?
Perhaps out of that grim reality Israel could strike an accommodation with the Fatah-ruled Palestinian Authority to take control over the Gaza Strip in cooperation with the Israeli military to ensure Hamas can never create a military wing again. But that scenario is unlikely. The Palestinian Authority is unpopular in the West Bank, where corruption and dysfunction have fueled anger and dissatisfaction. It has a lousy track record in Gaza where it ruled briefly from 2005 to 2007 before being ousted by Hamas in elections. It would hardly help the Palestinian Authority to ride into Gaza on the backs of Israeli tanks.
Then there is the possibility that Hamas could return to Gaza as soon as Israeli tanks pull out. No matter the result of the coming Israeli war, it’s far from clear that the population in Gaza would be willing to move on from Hamas, which is more than a political party or a military wing. It’s a social movement, spawned in the late 1980s as the Palestinian branch of the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood. “The only attractive movement right now is Hamas,” says Ghaith al-Omari, a former PA official now at the Washington Institute. “You can destroy all of its physical infrastructure, but it's very hard to destroy the idea.”
Even worse for Israel, from a security standpoint, would be that Gaza becomes so volatile it would be impossible for a single ruling entity to take hold. That could create a vacuum that leads to pockets of territorial rule by extremist forces, whether it be ISIS or one of its affiliates based in the southern Gaza city of Rafah, another Islamist or Salafi Jihadist movement, or a new iteration of Hamas, either in name or in spirit. “What are the environments in which extremists thrive?” says Khaled Elgindy, a former Palestinian Authority negotiator. “Power vacuums.” The new Gaza, in other words, could generate even more Islamist extremism.
Those unpleasant scenarios leave another painful possibility: that Israel may feel the need to stay in Gaza for years. Israel ruled over the coastal enclave from 1967 until 2005 and going back in for a sustained occupation would require the ongoing presence of IDF troops in Gaza, who would be vulnerable to ambushes. It would foment more Palestinian resentment toward Israel, spawning a new generation of combatants. It would risk triggering wider regional instability and potentially drawing America into a war. And it would trap Israel in a profound moral and military crisis. Any hope for the eventual resurrection of the U.S.-brokered Israeli-Saudi Arabia normalization agreement would be foreclosed. The deal would likely go from dead to dead and buried. Little surprise President Joe Biden has already warned Israel against reoccupation.
The lack of realistic scenarios is starting to produce unrealistic ones. Some Americans and Israelis are floating the idea of an international trusteeship that would govern the Gaza Strip on an interim basis until a permanent solution is reached, a kind of return to the “mandate” system that predated the creation of Israel. The United Nations would serve as a steward to direct a massive infusion of cash for humanitarian relief and rebuilding the battered Gaza cities flattened from uncountable rounds of artillery. After a period of physical reconstruction, the peace-keeping force would oversee elections in which Palestinians could choose their new leaders. But while the idea sounds good on paper, few people think it’s possible. “This is fantasy,” says Rashid Khalidi, a Palestinian-American historian and former PLO peace negotiator in the 1990s. “These people are living in an alternative reality.”
That Israel hasn't articulated an endgame worries those with even a cursory sense of recent history in the Middle East. One need look no further than the American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. “There is the fear of a slippery slope,” al-Omari says. “You break it, you own it.” That's why longtime diplomats argue that military might alone is unlikely to solve Israel’s problems in Gaza. It will also need statecraft. “You can't treat the use of force as an end in itself,” says Ross. “There has to be a focus on what is the political result of this.”
Unfortunately, few see hope for a positive outcome from a sustained victory by Israel over Hamas. “We don't have better and bad scenarios, or better and bad options,” says Avi Isaacharoff, a veteran Israeli journalist and Middle East analyst who co-created the series Fauda. “What we're facing is somewhere in between the bad, the worse, and the worst.”
TIME
3. US military has more work to do integrating women, report finds
The 57 page RAND report can be downloaded here: https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RRA1600/RRA1696-1/RAND_RRA1696-1.pdf
Despite the subtle negative tone of this article toward Army SOF I think there are a lot of people at USASOC working in good faith trying to improve this situation. But I think this article illustrates the difficulties. There is no simple solution as indicated by the excerpt.
Excerpts:
The RAND study points out that the military is still walking a fine line between touting women and men as having the same capacity to serve while celebrating the different perspectives women bring to the table.
“There are concerns with both approaches: The first encourages women to conform to established masculine norms, while the latter encourages gender essentialism,” according to the report — in other words, that there are traits only women or only men possess.
But I think this excerpt is really a key point. I think the effort to demonstrate the efficacy of integration is important. I think actual demonstrated results need to be examined. Other than the women in Afghan SOF example, none of the "real world scenarios" examined in the report demonstrate tactical combat outcomes. They illustrate the value in humanitarian contingencies but there are no other combat scenarios described.
Excerpt:
To show how women’s contributions have improved operational outcomes, the report’s authors created a series of five real-life scenarios.
US military has more work to do integrating women, report finds
militarytimes.com · by Meghann Myers · October 20, 2023
Though women have technically been welcome in any military specialty since late 2015, it’s been a slow process to integrate them into all units, according to a report released Thursday by the Rand Corp.
The U.S. and its partner nations will need to continue to integrate women, at all ranks, to be able to solve complex security challenges, the report said, using the “Women, peace and security” concept developed by the UN in 2000. As it currently stands, women make up 18% of the Army. In the Marine Corps, the representation is half that.
In 2020, DoD published its own Women, Peace, and Security Strategic Framework and Implementation Plan, which aimed to not only ensure women hold varied positions throughout all parts of the department, but that partner nations fostered the same participation for women while ensuring human rights protections for women and girls in their respective countries.
The RAND study points out that the military is still walking a fine line between touting women and men as having the same capacity to serve while celebrating the different perspectives women bring to the table.
“There are concerns with both approaches: The first encourages women to conform to established masculine norms, while the latter encourages gender essentialism,” according to the report — in other words, that there are traits only women or only men possess.
The problem is most pronounced in special operations. A 2021 U.S. Army Special Operations Command study found that women were often excluded or singled out for being parents, for what they wear and for perceptions that they are either too sweet or too tough.
RELATED
Women in Army SOF sidelined by ‘benevolent sexism,’ study finds
Those are some of the key findings from an internal study by U.S. Army Special Operations Command on barriers to service for women in the ranks.
By Hope Hodge Seck
To show how women’s contributions have improved operational outcomes, the report’s authors created a series of five real-life scenarios.
Afghan special operations forces are one example of successful integration, the report found.
“During mission planning stages, the presence of women Afghan SOF proved key to gaining intelligence for sensing missions,” the report stated. “These forces gathered information from women and children in ways Afghan men and foreign SOF were not able to,” noting the cultural norms preventing men from speaking to women and children outside of immediate families.
During the 2021 Tradewinds exercise in U.S. Southern Command, U.S. trainers noticed that while women served in the Guyanese military, they were often relegated to support roles. Trainers encouraged leadership to build female-only facilities along the contested, but undermanned Guyana-Venezuela border, so that women could help secure the area alongside men.
“By bringing WPS principles and experts to bear on the 2021 Tradewinds exercise, Guyana was able to address an operational obstacle and the United States gained a partner in the SOUTHCOM region that has men and women in uniform who are better equipped to detect the nuances and dynamics of challenges, such as human trafficking, enhancing the security and stability of nations across the region,” according to the report.
The report recommends that DoD continue to bring women along when developing or executing missions or policies, both within the U.S. military and when working with partner nations.
“Without an effort to integrate both women and men into all roles across DoD, the military will not be able to meet the security situations of today and tomorrow that will require people to unpack complexity and solve problems, not as a leader in isolation but cooperatively,” according to the report.
About Meghann Myers
Meghann Myers is the Pentagon bureau chief at Military Times. She covers operations, policy, personnel, leadership and other issues affecting service members.
4. A sniper’s rifle, the subject of a lesson at a sniper school in Ukraine.
Impressive photos at the link: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/21/world/europe/ukraine-russia-war-snipers.html?referringSource=articleShare&smid=nytcore-ios-share&utm
TM Gibbons-Neff is an amazing young journalist who will become one of America’s best war reporters of the modern era. From a Marine grunt in combat to a Georgetown journalism degree to the Washington Post as an intern and then full time to the New York Times. His reporting from Afghanistan was some of the best and now his reporting from Ukraine is first class and unlike any contemporary journalist can provide given his youth and background (which is what helps make his reporting so superb).
A sniper’s rifle, the subject of a lesson at a sniper school in Ukraine.
A New York Times reporter who is a former Marine has a conversation with a Ukrainian sniper about morality in war.
By Thomas Gibbons-Neff
Reporting from southern Ukraine
Oct. 21, 2023
nytimes.com · by Thomas Gibbons-Neff · October 21, 2023
Two snipers, wearing military green and seen from behind, look out through a hole in a brick wall. One is peering through the scope of a rifle.
What you need to understand about a sniper mission is that from the minute it begins to the minute it ends, everything you do is in service of killing another human being.
But almost no one says that. So it was a little startling when — standing in the stairwell of a half-destroyed building in southern Ukraine, in the midst of a mission with a team of Ukrainian snipers — one soldier decided to explain to me his moral calculations when killing Russian troops.
He was saying the quiet part out loud.
The front line was roughly a mile away. The snipers stared through the scopes of their rifles, waiting for something or someone to move. Machine gunfire ratatated in the distance. I was hungry and ate a cold chicken nugget purchased at a gas station many hours before.
We had been awake since 3 a.m., when a colleague from The New York Times and I crammed into two trucks with the sniper team and drove for about an hour — though it seemed much longer — over jagged back roads and shattered bridges to the front line.
Thirteen years earlier, as a U.S. Marine corporal, I had led a sniper team of seven Marines and a Navy corpsman in southern Afghanistan.
That was probably the only reason the Ukrainian snipers agreed to take me with them. They trusted that I had done the thing, and that even with a language barrier, I understood what was happening around me: orders of work, setting up a hide, the quiet monotony and flurry of activity that comes with watching the same spot for hours or days with a rifle purpose-built to kill at long range.
The soldier in the stairwell, a Ukrainian sniper who chose to go by his call sign, Raptor, seemed especially weary as he explained himself. He had shot competitively before the war and had become adept at shooting paper and steel targets.
Now it was different: He was shooting people. At such long distances, it took several seconds for the bullet to find its way through air to cloth, then flesh. Long enough for the rifle’s recoil to dissipate and for his watchful eye to readjust in the scope, framing the show of his own violence.
“I’m not proud of this,” Raptor began in deliberate English.
Overtired and cautious not to throttle what he had to say, I dared not take notes. Only after we talked, I jotted something down: “Killing someone … I’m not proud of this.”
Violence in any conflict is processed differently by those involved and those not. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has been characterized by its sheer brutality — including cities leveled by bombardment and mass graves — and by how accepting much of the world has become of wholesale death and destruction.
Casualty numbers — inflated, closely guarded and impossible to verify — are traded like sports scores between Kyiv and Moscow. Snuff videos of combatants being killed by drones, gunfire and artillery circulate like some digital token of battlefield action.
None of that changes the reality that entire generations in Ukraine and Russia are being thinned death by death.
As in any war, to cushion the effects of their own violence, those fighting fall back on the hierarchical imperatives of modern military service. Ukrainian soldiers also realize that to lose the war is to lose their country to an invader.
“We kill not because we are vicious, but because it’s our order, our duty,” Raptor said.
His reflection had a level of clarity that had taken me years to find myself. How could he talk about pride and duty in the middle of the act? There was no time for that here, in the middle of a war.
But Raptor stood in front of me, wrestling with something we dared not talk about in Afghanistan. He was breaking the fourth wall.
“I think of people on the other side,” he said. “They might not want to be here, but they are here.”
Raptor was working his way through the subject that sniper cultures often avoid. Few times during my deployment did I pause to consider the Taliban. At least in conversation. We conditioned ourselves that Talibs were targets and little else. Our time revolved around killing them as they killed us, and before they killed us more.
It would take years for me to realize how indoctrinated we all were. Raptor already understood — at least enough to articulate his findings to a stranger in a stairwell amid the thud of distant artillery strikes — that he was killing a human being, and trying to explain why.
“I don’t want to kill, but I have to — I’ve seen what they’ve done,” Raptor went on, his own moral and martial purpose linked to the atrocities Russian forces had committed throughout the war. For Raptor, the reason for pulling the trigger was clear. For me and my comrades, all these years later, the reason we chose to kill can continue to elude us.
We found ourselves in the middle of some poorly thought-out counterinsurgency strategy, propping up a corrupt government that collapsed almost as soon as the United States left. We were protecting each other. That became a binding ideology, all the clarity we could summon in the puzzle our politicians in Washington handed us. We stumbled through exhausted, mouthing our lines, until our tours ended and we were discharged.
Now we’re discomforted by our own killings, aware of the details and the violence we committed under the bright banners of “nation-building” or “winning hearts and minds,” or whatever our officers told us as the seasons changed. In the shadow of our failures, our silence hangs over it all.
It was hard not to be jealous of Raptor and his team, especially in the wake of my lost war. Therein was the trap, the dizzying seduction of the “good kill.”
Raptor’s mission ended at dusk without a shot being fired. And after another hourlong car ride, we arrived in the parking lot of the same gas station where I had ordered my chicken nuggets that morning. The sky was oily black. The only light from the rest stop seeped through the cracks in the sandbags that shielded its windows.
Raptor and the rest of the sniper team asked if we wanted dinner. Then they apologized, in the way of wearied tradesmen who had not done their jobs, for a day without a kill.
5. Video Analysis Shows Gaza Hospital Hit By Failed Rocket Meant for Israel
Worth the 4 minutes of your time to watch. very impressive research. Of course it takes time to put this kind of analysis together and can never be done fast enough to counter Hamas' initial erroneous and misleading reporting.
A key point from the report is that the UN determined that in 2022 20% of the rockets launched from Gaza failed. This is something that needs to be included in future media reporting as well as in talking points from officials.
Video Analysis Shows Gaza Hospital Hit By Failed Rocket Meant for Israel
10/21/2023 6:05PM
A video analysis by the Wall Street Journal using security cameras and live feeds inside Israel and Gaza shows how a failed rocket caused the deadly explosion at Al-Ahli Arab Hospital. Photo illustration: Ryan Trefes
https://www.wsj.com/video/video-analysis-shows-gaza-hospital-hit-by-failed-rocket-meant-for-israel/120A1C22-BA32-418E-8837-BC4141FEFB00.html
6. Inside the Commando Raids Unnerving Russia in Crimea
Buried lede: Missions of Russian tourists are still going to Crimea.
Excerpts:
In late June the Chonhar bridge on one of the main roads out of the peninsula was damaged. On July 17, the Kerch bridge was hit again, this time by an unmanned seaborne vehicle. A local nongovernmental organization, SOS Crimea, reported almost daily explosions on the peninsula over the weeks that followed.
The attacks have had a sharp effect on the Russian public. From a peak of nine million in 2019, the number of Russian tourists visiting Crimea dropped to six million last year and a little over four million so far this year, local officials said.
Thousands of Russians who settled in Crimea or bought real estate there after it was annexed in 2014 are selling their properties, and prices have tumbled, said Lyudmyla Denisova, a former Ukrainian lawmaker who has family members living in Crimea.
Inside the Commando Raids Unnerving Russia in Crimea
The lightning assaults are part of a larger campaign using drones and missiles to degrade Russian forces and demoralize the public.
By Carlotta Gall and Oleksandr Chubko
Reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine
Oct. 22, 2023
Updated 11:08 a.m. ET
nytimes.com · by Oleksandr Chubko · October 22, 2023
Two men sit side by side in a dimly lighted room, both concealing their faces, one behind a mask and the other under the brim of his cap.
Late one evening this month, two Ukrainian commandos eased into a side street in Kyiv in a battered SUV. Back from a dangerous nighttime assault on Russian positions in the Crimean peninsula, they slipped into a sparsely furnished apartment where they sat at desks, weary and a little disheveled, and described their latest operation in matter-of-fact fashion.
“Very tough,” said Askold, 38. “It was our most difficult operation yet,” added Kukhar, 23. Members of a unit in the special operations forces of G.U.R., Ukraine’s military intelligence service, the men gave only their call signs in accordance with military protocol.
The two men had joined more than 30 others racing more than 100 miles across the western Black Sea on jet skis to attack critical Russian defense installations before making their getaway, the second Ukrainian amphibious raid in six weeks.
The raids were part of a series of punishing attacks on Crimea by Ukrainian forces since midsummer that have succeeded in disabling some Russian air-defense systems and damaging naval repair yards at Sevastopol. Russia later moved 10 warships from Sevastopol on the west coast of Crimea to the port of Novorossisk on the Russian mainland, though U.S. officials say it remains unclear whether the withdrawals were tied to security concerns or just a regular rotation.
But there is no denying that attacks within Crimea are increasing, and may rise even further with the new ATACMS long-range missiles just delivered from the United States. “A dynamic, deep strike battle is underway,” British military intelligence said in a statement.
The partial retreat of the Black Sea Fleet from Sevastopol, its base for more than 200 years, has helped Ukraine break a Russian blockade and keep some shipping moving in the Black Sea. And it comes as a welcome success for Kyiv as it seeks to extend its counteroffensive beyond the bloody slog through Russian minefields.
Ukrainian military leaders have long pronounced their intention to regain control of Crimea, which some military analysts see as unlikely. For Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, who directed the seizure of Crimea, it is not only a vital base for Russian operations in southern Ukraine, but a jewel of the Russian empire that he has vowed to keep.
The Ukrainian campaign began a year ago with an attack on the Kerch Strait Bridge, a Russian showpiece of construction that links the Crimean peninsula to the Russian mainland. But it was ramped up with this summer’s counteroffensive, when Ukrainian forces began targeting Crimea with missile strikes deep behind the frontline.
Long-range missiles hit bridges on road and rail routes linking the peninsula to the rest of Ukraine, as well as air defenses and military bases and command posts. The aim was to disrupt the Russian military’s logistics and degrade its ability to function, a tactic that Ukraine’s top commander, Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, had used in counteroffensives in the Kharkiv and Kherson regions.
In late June the Chonhar bridge on one of the main roads out of the peninsula was damaged. On July 17, the Kerch bridge was hit again, this time by an unmanned seaborne vehicle. A local nongovernmental organization, SOS Crimea, reported almost daily explosions on the peninsula over the weeks that followed.
The attacks have had a sharp effect on the Russian public. From a peak of nine million in 2019, the number of Russian tourists visiting Crimea dropped to six million last year and a little over four million so far this year, local officials said.
Thousands of Russians who settled in Crimea or bought real estate there after it was annexed in 2014 are selling their properties, and prices have tumbled, said Lyudmyla Denisova, a former Ukrainian lawmaker who has family members living in Crimea.
“Every successful Ukrainian strike complicates life in Crimea,” she said.
The most devastating blows came in mid-September, when missiles struck a Russian submarine and a landing ship in the dry docks of the port of Sevastopol. A week later, the Ukrainians fired long-range Storm Shadow missiles into the command headquarters of the Black Sea Fleet, also in Sevastopol, wounding dozens of officers.
More Crimeans have come forward with offers of information to Ukrainian intelligence since that attack, said Sevgil Musaieva, the editor of the Kyiv-based daily Ukrainska Pravda, citing Ukrainian intelligence officials.
They were scared to share information before, she said, adding that now, “maybe they expect that something will happen soon and they want to help the Ukrainian armed forces.”
Alongside the missile strikes, the G.U.R. began its commando activities. In late July, its operatives took control of the Boyko Towers — a group of gas drilling rigs in the western Black Sea that Russia seized in 2014 but had since abandoned — and dismantled a surveillance antenna.
On Aug. 24, Ukrainian commandos made their first known raid on Crimea since 2016, attacking a Russian base on Cape Tarkhankut, the westernmost point of the peninsula. The base houses an antenna and systems that jam electronic communications over a wide area.
“Thanks to this antenna they see everything in the sea,” said a commander of the Bratstvo group, which carried out the raid, identified by his call sign, Borghese. “The task was to approach them at very close range and blow them up,” he added.
Bratstvo, which means “brotherhood” in Ukrainian, is a political party led by Dmytro Korchynsky, a veteran of wars in the Caucasus fighting against Russian troops in the 1990s, who is reported to have ties to former Soviet and Ukrainian intelligence services. The party has been described variously as Christian nationalist and right-wing extremist. Since the beginning of the full-scale war, which began in February 2022, Bratstvo volunteers have been integrated with the ranks of the G.U.R. and mounted the first attacks into Russia last year and on Crimean soil this year.
For the first commando raid, Borghese had bought a flotilla of jet skis to transport 20 men to a Russian base on Cape Tarkhankut. Led by a commander whose call sign is Muraha, they set off at dusk with an accompanying supply boat, riding into a complete electronic blackout because of the Russian jamming systems, relying only on a hand-held compass. Because of the discomfort of doubling up on the jet skis, half of the men rode in the supply boat for much of the way.
With the Russian Navy largely absent from the western part of the Black Sea, the greatest threat to the Ukrainian commandos was from the air. Russia has air supremacy in the area, and conventional Ukrainian vessels have come under repeated attack from Russian jets. But the small size and low profile of jet skis helped them to evade notice.
They reached the shore in the early hours of the morning, landing on a pebbly beach. Armed with four machine guns, five of the men climbed a hill and took positions overlooking the base and the antenna.
As the rest of the group came ashore, Russian machine guns guarding the base opened fire, Muraha said. But the men on the hill were ready and laid down suppressive machine-gun fire of their own.
Using shoulder-held launchers, they fired several rocket-propelled grenades at the antenna and the base before retreating. Some of the group raised a Ukrainian flag against a building, capturing it on video before making their getaway.
The group escaped without injury. But the supply boat had come under fire and retreated, so all 20 commandos had to make the six-hour return trip on the jet skis, which were specially outfitted with compartments to carry ammunition and extra fuel.
Intercepts of Russian communications indicated that the Russians had taken casualties in the attack, Borghese said, but he did not know if the main target, the antenna, had been hit.
Nick Reynolds, a research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London, described the raid on Crimea as “tactically interesting,” but premature. “Ukraine is not yet in a position to capitalize on any weakening of Russian defenses there,” he said.
Borghese said the main achievement of the operation was to change perceptions, proving that Ukrainian forces could reach the Crimean shore and showing the Russian public that Crimea was no longer a safe place.
“It raises our Ukrainian morale and it diminishes Russian and Crimean morale,” he said. “They cannot relax on these beaches anymore.”
Julian E. Barnes and Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington, and Haley Willis from New York.
Our Coverage of the War in Ukraine
How We Verify Our Reporting
nytimes.com · by Oleksandr Chubko · October 22, 2023
7. Documents found on fighters reveal Hamas capabilities, bloody plans
We need more exposure of this.
Documents found on fighters reveal Hamas capabilities, bloody plans
By Loveday Morris and Steve Hendrix
October 21, 2023 at 8:06 p.m. EDT
The Washington Post · by Loveday Morris · October 22, 2023
ASHKELON, Israel — A Hamas field manual obtained by The Washington Post and other documents found in the wake of the group’s brutal attack on Israel two weeks ago illustrate some of its military capabilities and preparations for close-in, bloody killing.
The manual, dated last year and found on the body of a Hamas fighter, lists instructions on operating certain weapons, identifies vulnerabilities in Israeli military equipment and offers tips on killing with a knife. The document appears to have been prepared for different units of Hamas’s elite Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades, including anti-armor, engineering, sniper, infantry and tunnel specialists as well as what the booklet describes as “shock troops.”
“This is a secret military document,” the first page begins. “It should be kept in a safe place. It is forbidden to move with it except when there are orders.”
On its back cover is a picture of the Palestinian sheikh Abdullah Azzam, a mentor of Osama bin Laden. “If this is their source of inspiration, and this is the figure, the symbol, they are looking at, I understand something more about their behavior on Oct. 7,” said Michael Milshtein, a former head of the Palestinian department in Israeli military intelligence, referring to the date of the attack that left 1,400 Israelis dead. Milshtein examined the field manual at the request of The Post.
Experts, including Milshtein, said the manual appeared to be genuine and matches a cache of other documents gathered by Israeli forces and first responders following the attack. The Israeli prime minister’s office has verified 17 pages of documents for The Post. Some documents, including the field manual, were not provided for verification because of identifying marks that could identify who first found them and gave them to The Post.
Others Hamas documents have included maps and detailed plans for attacks on several individual kibbutzim around Gaza, including the intention to kill and kidnap civilians.
The document obtained by The Post provided guidance on operating weapons that they are known to have carried and also offered detailed descriptions on the vulnerabilities of Israeli tanks and armored vehicles. Included, for instance, are instructions for using North Korean F-7 rocket-propelled grenades, which Pyongyang has denied supplying to Hamas. Around 50 of the high-explosive munitions were found by Israeli troops following the attacks, according to the military, which has displayed some of the materiel it found.
Hamas officials in Gaza and Beirut did not respond to requests for comment.
Hamas’s secretive military wing al-Qassam is estimated to have a built a force of anywhere between 15,000 and 40,000 combat-ready fighters — 1,200 of whom it has said were involved in the Oct. 7 attack.
In earlier years when tunnels were open to Egypt, Hamas could easily smuggle in explosives and rockets to Gaza, said Mkhaimar Abusada, an analyst at Gaza’s Al-Azhar University. But Egyptian President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi has clamped down on smuggling routes.
“Honestly I don’t know how they have kept up their ability to build this military capability,” Abusada said, noting the security perimeter around Gaza. Members of al-Qassam’s elite Nukhba special forces that spearheaded the assault are known to have been trained in Iran and have returned to Gaza to train others, he said.
Militants used paragliders, motorbikes and trucks to cross the border fence from Gaza into Israel, and small specialized units attacked Israeli communities, in line with the instructions in the handbook.
“We saw they are working as professional troops,” said Maj. G, a commander of the Israeli Institute for Weapons Research on Friday, as he displayed weapons that had been seized from Hamas. The major could only be identified by his rank and first name under rules set by the Israeli briefers. “They worked very specifically. It was very organized. One vehicle is IED, one vehicle was RPGs, one vehicle was a command team.”
The instructions for “shock troops” also included the best places to stab someone, according to the field manual obtained by The Post. The “neck in the collarbone area,” “spine” and “underarms” are listed.
Aymenn al-Tamimi, an expert with the Middle East Forum who has extensively studied documents recovered from battlefields in Iraq and Syria agreed that it appeared genuine. “It wouldn’t be surprising for documents like this to be in the possession of fighters,” he said.
The Israeli military says hundreds of documents and other material have been collected by the Intelligence Directorate and the Yahalom combat engineering unit, including Hamas cellphones, communication equipment, cameras and intelligence reports.
Many documents have emerged in a Telegram channel called South First Responders, which compiles evidence gathered in the aftermath of the attacks by those clearing the areas. The group declines to answer questions on its methods for gathering documents and material — citing risks to sources.
Those who have worked to remove the bodies of hundreds of Palestinian militants killed in the assault say that corpses are first checked over by bomb squads to make sure there are no hidden explosives.
“They came with everything, fully equipped, with documents, maps and instructions,” said Yossi Landau, a front-line responder with the Zaka medical organization, which has been working to remove bodies.
One 14-page document partially posted by South First Responders and verified by Israeli authorities outlined attack plans for Mefalsim, a small kibbutz of 1,000 people that managed to escape relatively unscathed from the attack. Kibbutz security fought off a group of around 30 militants armed with grenades and AK-47s at the front gate.
The document details the size of the Kibbutz security team, the number of minutes it would take to travel between various points in the community and the goal to “take soldiers and civilians as prisoners and hostages and negotiate their release.”
According to four additional pages obtained by The Post, the team at the front gate was supposed to distract the Kibbutz security force while a Hamas explosives unit blew a hole in the back gate.
“The group keeps the Kibbutz busy until the rest of the forces arrive,” the planning document said. But the reinforcements never arrived, according to those that fought in the Kibbutz.
“They knew where the gates were, they knew where the generators were to cut the electricity,” said Yarden Reskin, a landscape architect and volunteer on the security team at the kibbutz. Looking at the attack plans, and the death toll in surrounding communities: “We do feel like we had a lot of luck,” he said. “We did our part, we did it good, but we had a lot of luck.”
Hendrix reported from Jerusalem.
The Washington Post · by Loveday Morris · October 22, 2023
8. Biden hitches Israel aid to less popular Ukraine war support
Excerpts:
In a message to Palestinian civilians, Biden offered comfort by sympathizing with their suffering and tried to distinguish the general population from Hamas. So far, about 4,000 Palestinians have died under the rain of Israeli missiles and artillery. There has been no word from Hamas about how many of them were combatants.
Besides stopping short of laying out how the Israelis and Palestinians would arrange a two-state solution, Biden also made no mention of who would run Gaza should the Israelis succeed in destroying Hamas, as Netanyahu has pledged.
The ambiguity harkens back to the US occupation of Iraq in 2003 after having ousted Saddam Hussein from power. US General David Petraeus, who commanded US forces in northern Iraq, expressed worries at the time about a lack of clarity regarding the country’s future.
“Tell me how this ends,” he asked with exasperation. The same question might be asked and ought to be answered for Israel and the Palestinians.
Biden hitches Israel aid to less popular Ukraine war support
Biden describes US as ‘beacon to the world’ in a speech to drum up war support but concerns of Pax Americana overstretch are rising
asiatimes.com · by Daniel Williams · October 21, 2023
US President Joe Biden gave a televised speech Thursday night, providing a verbal tour of his thoughts on both the Hamas-Israel war and Russia’s attack on Ukraine.
His speech vividly described the horrors visited on civilian victims of both conflicts when Hamas invaded Israel from the Gaza Strip and Russian President Vladimir Putin made war on Ukraine 22 months ago.
Biden offered sympathy to Palestinian civilians not associated with Hamas and mentioned conversations with leaders of Egypt and the Palestinian Authority, which runs parts of the West Bank. He proclaimed it America’s duty to help Israel and Ukraine in their fights because the US is the “beacon to the world.”
He backed the Ukrainian goal of ousting the Russians from their country. He did the same for Israel, but there was a difference between Ukraine, which is defending its own sovereign territory, and Israel, which is ousting an armed group from land it has agreed is not its own and which it does not want to occupy.
In short, what happens after the war’s end? Biden made only fleeting reference to his own desire once the Israel-Hamas war, now entering its third week, is over. He devoted one sentence to his preferred outcome: adherence to what is known as the two-state solution—i.e. the creation of a Palestinian state encompassing the Gaza Strip and the West Bank alongside Israel.
“We cannot give up on a two-state solution,” he said.
It is a concept actively favored by the United States since at least 1991. Biden outlined no road map on how to make it a reality.
Hamas, created during a Palestinian uprising in 1987, opposes the two-state solution, while the Palestinian Authority accepts it. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also opposes it.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has long opposed a two-state solution. Photo: Asia Times Files / Pool / Amir Cohen
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Netanyahu has fought against the two-state solution his entire political career, which includes five stints as prime minister. Since 1993, the first time Netanyahu took power, the Israeli population of the West Bank has grown from about 115,000 to more than 465,000.
During Biden’s visit, Israeli officials said that talk of a search for a solution to the long-running Palestinian conflict would have to wait until Hamas is defeated.
In any case, Biden’s mind seemed less on future peacemaking than on politics in Washington. He dedicated part of his speech to an appeal for the US Congress to approve joint aid for Israel and Ukraine, combined in a single legislative package.
Aid to Israel incites almost no opposition, but there is skepticism among opposition politicians in the Republican Party about the efficacy and size of aid to Ukraine. Biden hopes to avoid a heated debate, so he wants to harness the Ukraine request to the popular one for Israel.
This might seem an unimportant debate, but the money issue underlies concerns over not only US involvement in current armed conflict but also potentially other ones in a world of mounting warfare.
Then there’s the perceived threat from China, which both political parties consider a major security issue. When he took office in 2020, Biden had planned to perform a so-called “pivot to China” of military resources to beef up the defenses of East Asia.
But, in the meantime, the US has pledged to back Ukraine for as long as it takes to oust the Russians. It is now providing tons of weapons to Israel, already the most powerful military force in the Middle East. And Biden has threatened military action against Iran if it intervenes in the Hamas fight.
Rising global instability has prompted concern whether the US can carry the burden of being what was once called the “world’s policeman.”
In addition, journalistic and scholarly commentary warn of the possibility of the end of a quarter century of Pax-Americana, an era after the Cold War’s end when only the US possessed the military power, resources and will to dominate global politics.
Recent funeral-themed titles of articles dedicated to the decline of US influence and power include: “The Last Days of Pax Americana,” “Towards the End of Pax Americana?” and “The Death Throes of Pax Americana.”
Biden has rejected such concerns. Besides his “America is a beacon” comment, he also harkened back to early post-Cold War years when US influence seemed limitless.
He quoted the late Madeleine Albright, President Bill Clinton’s hawkish secretary of state, who when publicly defending a four-day US bombardment of then bête noire Iraq described the United States as the “indispensable nation.”
Biden’s short trip was designed not only to show support to Israel, but also to mold its way of making war in order to limit harming civilians. In his televised speech, Biden said he told Netanyahu not to be “blinded by rage” and follow the “laws of war.”
Sympathy for Palestinians is in short supply across Israel; about 1,400 Israelis were killed by Hamas during its raid into Israel, many in brutal fashion.
Two specific requests by Biden quickly became subjects of controversy. He announced that Israel would ensure the passage of food and water supplies into the Gaza Strip from Egypt. Before Biden’s visit, Netanyahu had announced he would not let food and water from outside to enter Gaza.
However, no sooner had Biden spoken on TV than Netanyahu and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi were squabbling over who would inspect the cargo to ensure no weapons were hidden aboard the shipments.
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Before his visit, Israel had informed Palestinians to leave northern Gaza neighborhoods in order to avoid heavy danger from combat when Israel strikes back on the ground. There was little outcry among Israelis against the orders, but human rights campaigners abroad pointed out that such actions were tantamount to war crimes.
The lethal aftermath of a hospital bombing in Gaza both sides blamed on the other. Civilians are in the crossfire of the war. Image: Screengrab
In a message to Palestinian civilians, Biden offered comfort by sympathizing with their suffering and tried to distinguish the general population from Hamas. So far, about 4,000 Palestinians have died under the rain of Israeli missiles and artillery. There has been no word from Hamas about how many of them were combatants.
Besides stopping short of laying out how the Israelis and Palestinians would arrange a two-state solution, Biden also made no mention of who would run Gaza should the Israelis succeed in destroying Hamas, as Netanyahu has pledged.
The ambiguity harkens back to the US occupation of Iraq in 2003 after having ousted Saddam Hussein from power. US General David Petraeus, who commanded US forces in northern Iraq, expressed worries at the time about a lack of clarity regarding the country’s future.
“Tell me how this ends,” he asked with exasperation. The same question might be asked and ought to be answered for Israel and the Palestinians.
asiatimes.com · by Daniel Williams · October 21, 2023
9. Ukraine celebrates spectacular debut of ATACMS by playing Neil Diamond's 'Hello Again' over images of US missiles in action
Ukraine celebrates spectacular debut of ATACMS by playing Neil Diamond's 'Hello Again' over images of US missiles in action
Business Insider · by Rebecca Rommen
Screenshot from video posted by StratCom Ukraine.
Centre for Strategic Communications | StratCom Ukraine
- Ukraine posted a video of new US-supplied missiles in action over Neil Diamond's hit "Hello."
- The ATACMS were discreetly received this month and successfully used against Russia this week.
- The new missiles reportedly targeted Russian airfields and took out multiple enemy helicopters.
Ukraine celebrated its first spectacular use of US-supplied ATACMS with a Neil Diamond song.
Ukraine confirmed the news that the missiles had been deployed on Tuesday in a whimsical video posted by The Ukrainian Centre for Strategic Communications, accompanied by the voice of Neil Diamond singing his hit, "Hello Again."
"It's good to need you so," sings Diamond in the romantic song over a montage of the ATACMS arriving in Ukraine and being fired.
The video's message declares, "They say good things come to those who wait. Buddy, they ain't kidding." It signs off the video with images of Russian helicopters silhouetted by flames and explosions, saying, "Thank you, America."
Britain's defense ministry said in a Friday intelligence update that it is "likely" nine helicopters were destroyed at Berdyansk alone, alongside five more in Luhansk. Beyond the short-term win, it also may leave lasting damage on Russia's airpower, wrote Insider's Jake Epstein.
The MGM-140 Army Tactical Missile System is a tactical ballistic missile manufactured by Lockheed Martin, a US defense company.
—SPRAVDI — Stratcom Centre (@StratcomCentre) October 17, 2023
The US discreetly delivered a limited number of long-range ballistic missiles to support the war-torn nation's defense efforts. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy confirmed this development in an evening address, thanking the US for the continued military support.
Zelenskyy said the missiles had already been used on the battlefield and were executed "very accurately," per AP.
The covert delivery of these missiles follows a promise made by President Joe Biden last month. The high-precision missiles are seen as a game changer in the ongoing conflict, giving Ukrainian forces a critical edge and the ability to strike Russian targets at a considerable distance while keeping their troops safe, AP reports.
Though the US government chose to keep the delivery under wraps, officials familiar with the operation confirmed it. Fewer than a dozen missiles were successfully transported to Ukraine within the past few days, per AP.
The arrival of these advanced munitions on the war front will empower Ukrainian forces to engage Russian targets that were previously out of their reach.
Insider's Jake Epstein reported that Ukraine struck Russian airfields and took out enemy helicopters with their new ATACMS.
On Tuesday, Ukrainian forces launched attacks that damaged Russian airfields located well behind the frontline. A source familiar with the matter told Insider that the strikes involved the use of ATACMS.
According to Ukraine's defense ministry, the attacks targeted airfields in Berdyansk and Luhansk, which are situated in Russian-occupied territory.
Ukraine also posted a video of ATACMS being fired at Russians on Telegram.
The Pentagon responded to a request for comment from Insider but did not confirm the reporting on ATACMS.
Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said Ukraine is set to get more ATACMS that have a range of about 190 miles.
Business Insider · by Rebecca Rommen
10. US-China relations have stabilized, but in permafrost
Excerpts:
Those who expect that a Xi-Biden meeting in San Francisco will cause a breakthrough should recall that Biden and Xi had a similar face-to-face meeting a year ago in Bali. That meeting paved the way for several US cabinet members to visit China, but otherwise did nothing to solve the big issues causing bilateral friction.
Although the two leaders agreed in principle that a zero-sum relationship and a new cold war are undesirable, each government subsequently continued to blame the other’s policies for causing problems.
In this new stability, thaws will be more modest and less frequent. US-China relations are becoming more like US-North Korea relations, where a poor bilateral relationship is so ossified that hopeful observers get over-excited about a meeting between officials.
US-China relations have stabilized, but in permafrost
China seeks a return to robust economic engagement and tech collaboration but that’s no longer possible in the Xi era
asiatimes.com · by Denny Roy · October 20, 2023
The likely meeting between Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping and US President Joe Biden on the sidelines of the APEC summit in San Francisco in November supports hopes of a “thaw” in US-China relations this year. Biden predicted such a thaw earlier this year and some observers believe they see an upturn.
The outlook is less optimistic, however, if we assess the current state of the relationship from a longer historical perspective. For several decades, US relations with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) followed long cycles featuring high climbs and deep descents.
During the Korean War in the 1950s, the relationship reached a nadir with Chinese and American soldiers killing each other in battle. For years afterward, Washington remained deeply hostile toward China, viewing Mao’s regime as aggressive and irrational.
The 1970s, however, saw US President Richard Nixon’s visit to China, PRC paramount leader Deng Xiaoping’s visit to the US and the establishment of normal diplomatic relations.
Another serious downturn followed in 1989 with the Tiananmen Massacre. But in 1994 the relationship had recovered to the point where US President Bill Clinton de-linked the renewal of China’s Most Favored Nation trade status from the PRC government’s human rights record.
Relations weathered the shocks of the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis in 1995-96 and the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade by US aircraft in 1999. Clinton’s government granted China Permanent Normal Trade status in 1999, and China joined the World Trade Organization in 2000 with Washington’s support.
A bilateral crisis intervened in 2001, resulting from a collision over the ocean near the Chinese coast between a US surveillance aircraft and a recklessly maneuvering PRC fighter aircraft. The Chinese pilot died, and the PRC government imprisoned the US aircrew for 12 days while demanding an apology from Washington. Some members of Congress said the Chinese were taking “hostages” and deserved no apology.
Yet three years later, US-China relations had improved to the point where US Secretary of State Colin Powell called the relationship “the best we’ve had in 30 years.” Shortly thereafter, US Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick articulated the American vision of China as a “responsible stakeholder.” A US official making such a statement today seems unimaginable.
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That was the last multi-year high point before the Xi Jinping era began in 2012. Xi has presided over an era of steady decline in the bilateral relationship, marked by irritants such as China’s construction of military bases in the South China Sea, Chinese “Wolf Warrior” diplomacy, the Covid-19 pandemic, tensions over Taiwan, Chinese economic coercion against trade partners that are US friends and allies, PRC government-sponsored cybertheft, the Chinese spy balloon furor, US attempts to stop China from getting advanced technologies and Beijing’s pro-Russia position on the Ukraine war.
Importantly, the Xi era simultaneously saw China attain a level of military capability that forced Americans to begin to see the PRC as a peer competitor.
Chinese President Xi Jinping reviews a military display by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy in the South China Sea on April 12, 2018. Photo: Xinhua
Before Xi, the relationship was volatile in the sense of high mobility between cordial and hostile. The positive aspect of this volatility was the expectation that when relations were poor, eventually they would recover.
If US-China relations were a stock bought at US$50 per share, sometimes the value would go down to $30, but you could depend on it eventually bouncing back to $75.
Now, however, as a consequence of large, irreconcilable conflicts in the two governments’ vital interests, the scope for dramatic improvement in China-US relations is far more limited than prior to the Xi era.
The relationship is stable rather than volatile, but it has stabilized at a low level of quality, locking in poor bilateral relations for an extended period. The $50 stock may be stuck at $25 indefinitely. And it may drag down the rest of the stock market.
To be sure, the two countries have taken some steps this year to improve their relations. They’ve established working groups on economic and financial issues. In September, the PRC government assisted in the return of fugitive US soldier Travis King from North Korea to the US, earning thanks from the White House.
Several recent Chinese moves might be signals of goodwill with broader implications: the release of Australian journalist Cheng Lei after three years of imprisonment on questionable grounds, an agreement to cooperate with Western institutions in restructuring Zambia’s debt and an invitation to the US to send delegates to the Xiangshan defense forum in Beijing, China’s knock-off of Singapore’s annual Shangri-La Dialogue.
These mostly procedural and atmospheric steps are pathetically minor, however, compared to the substantive and intractable problems that still divide the PRC and the US.
On October 17, for instance, the US Department of Defense accused China of “a centralized and concerted campaign” of harassing US and allied aircraft in international airspace near China, also releasing a collection of photos and videos apparently showing Chinese fighter aircraft flying dangerously close to US aircraft.
Harassment missions by PRC aircraft and ships reflect both China’s disregard for some aspects of international law and Beijing’s insistence that other countries accord China a sphere of influence. Fundamentally, Beijing wants to replace US “hegemony” in the western Pacific with PRC pre-eminence. PRC public diplomacy daily condemns US global leadership, US regional influence, and US alliances.
Thus far, Washington shows no interest in re-trenching. Even four years of Donald Trump, who openly disparaged US alliance relationships and seemed inclined to follow a Jacksonian foreign policy, made hardly a dent in the well-established US posture of forward deployment in the Asia-Pacific.
Washington continues to challenge China’s claim of ownership over most of the South China Sea through diplomatic protests, “freedom of navigation” operations by US ships and aircraft, and support for pushback against Chinese claims by countries in the region.
Taiwan, as well, remains a flashpoint over which neither side will yield. Absent an agreement on their respective policies toward Taiwan, Washington and Beijing are trudging, zombie-like, toward an eventual cross-Strait war, as each tries unsuccessfully to warn off the other by making military preparations.
China demands that America return to the pre-Xi posture of heavy economic engagement and technological collaboration with minimal restrictions. That is no longer possible given US disillusionment with the Xi regime.
The pandemic subsequently supercharged this sentiment, as Americans learned how concretely vulnerable they were to Chinese-produced goods that might suddenly become unavailable either because of economic disruption in China or because of intentional Chinese economic coercion.
The clincher is a bipartisan commitment in the US to curtail cooperation, whether technology transfer or investment, that might enable PRC foreign policies that undercut US interests.
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Any possible US-China thaw can be extremely fragile, as we saw in June of this year. Days after the successful talks in China by his secretary of state, Biden remarked off-handedly that Beijing overreacted to the US shooting down the Chinese spy balloon because it caught Xi by surprise, and “That’s what’s a great embarrassment for dictators, when they didn’t know what happened.”
US sailors fish the collapsed Chinese spy balloon out of the Atlantic off South Carolina. Photo: US Navy
Biden was seemingly defending China against the hardline US view that Xi dispatched the balloon as an intentional humiliation of the US. Nevertheless, the PRC government responded angrily, saying Biden’s remarks were “ridiculous and irresponsible” and “seriously violate[d] basic facts, diplomatic protocol and China’s political dignity.”
Biden’s take reflected a highly plausible interpretation of the incident, but Beijing objects to Xi being called a “dictator” even though this description is factually correct.
Those who expect that a Xi-Biden meeting in San Francisco will cause a breakthrough should recall that Biden and Xi had a similar face-to-face meeting a year ago in Bali. That meeting paved the way for several US cabinet members to visit China, but otherwise did nothing to solve the big issues causing bilateral friction.
Although the two leaders agreed in principle that a zero-sum relationship and a new cold war are undesirable, each government subsequently continued to blame the other’s policies for causing problems.
In this new stability, thaws will be more modest and less frequent. US-China relations are becoming more like US-North Korea relations, where a poor bilateral relationship is so ossified that hopeful observers get over-excited about a meeting between officials.
Denny Roy is Senior Fellow at the Honolulu-based East-West Center.
asiatimes.com · by Denny Roy · October 20, 2023
11. Ukraine’s Counteroffensive Is More Successful Than You Think
Excerpts:
The success of Ukrainian naval operations against the Russian fleet has been all the more remarkable as Ukraine functionally no longer has a navy. Since 2014, the Russians have sunk, captured, or incapacitated all major Ukrainian warships except the flagship frigate Hetman Sahaidachny, which the Ukrainians themselves scuttled in early 2022 to prevent it from falling into Russian hands. Ukrainians have begun to routinely crack jokes about the mighty Russian Black Sea Fleet being sunk by a nation with no navy, but Russian naval officers are unlikely to be smiling.
The Ukrainian military has proved itself capable of incorporating new equipment into its arsenal quickly and to devastating effect—whether that be homegrown sea drones or Anglo-French-supplied missiles. If Western governments want to see more successes on the battlefield, providing Ukraine with more and longer-range missiles to continue denying Russia the freedom to move in Crimea would be a good place to start. Either way, Western observers should stop focusing only on the land war and put these remarkable Ukrainian achievements into the context they deserve. Otherwise, arguing in favor of providing Kyiv with the tools it needs to liberate its territories will be harder than it needs to be.
Ukraine’s Counteroffensive Is More Successful Than You Think
The focus on the stalled land war obscures major successes in Crimea and the Black Sea.
By Oz Katerji, a British Lebanese freelance journalist focusing on conflict, human rights, and the Middle East, and Vladislav Davidzon, the European culture correspondent at Tablet.
Foreign Policy · by Oz Katerji, Vladislav Davidzon · October 20, 2023
Recent coverage of the war in Ukraine in the Western media has focused heavily on Kyiv’s land offensive, especially attempts to push toward the Black Sea coast. Much of the scrutiny, rightly or wrongly, has been on Kyiv’s lack of significant progress so far this year, with nothing comparable to last year’s breakthrough offensives in Kharkiv and Kherson.
While some of this criticism may be justified, the almost singular Western focus on territorial breakthroughs has distracted from the fact that Ukraine is fighting a medium- to long-term war on multiple fronts against a significantly larger and heavily entrenched foe. What’s more, the lack of a major Ukrainian land advance obscures the very real battlefield successes Ukraine has had in other theaters of the conflict—most notably in Russian-occupied Crimea and the Black Sea.
A crucial part of Kyiv’s long-term plan for the war is to push Russia out of the Crimean Peninsula and the rest of the Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine’s coastline. Since the start of the full-scale invasion, Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, headquartered at the Crimean port of Sevastopol, has been a critical component of Moscow’s war effort. Russian warships operating out of Sevastopol have enforced a blockade of Ukraine’s coastline and launched cruise missiles to rain hell onto Ukrainian cities and infrastructure.
But over the last several months, Ukraine has achieved a series of startling victories in and around Crimea, including missile strikes against the Kerch Strait bridge and multiple daring attacks on the Black Sea Fleet itself—with major impacts on the Russians’ ability to operate on the peninsula and in the western Black Sea.
In September, the Ukrainians carried out a series of missile strikes against Russian naval assets in Sevastopol, including a landing ship, a submarine, and the headquarters of the Black Sea Fleet itself—reportedly while several high-ranking commanders were inside. Some of these strikes were carried out using Storm Shadow cruise missiles recently supplied by Britain and France. The Ukrainians have also ratcheted up their strikes against Russian logistics, repair, and infrastructure hubs on the peninsula with the intent of degrading Russia’s ability to support its fleet. Earlier this month, Kyiv claimed responsibility for two further attacks on the Russian fleet, using a new type of sea drone to strike the Russian cruise missile carrier Buyan and carrying out a sabotage attack on the Pavel Derzhavin, a Russian patrol ship. These strikes came after the Ukrainians had methodically attrited Russian anti-missile defense structures in Crimea over the previous weeks.
These successes constitute a major breakthrough for Ukraine. Its strikes against Crimea have now made it all but impossible for the Russian Black Sea Fleet to continue to operate freely in the western Black Sea. The Russian Navy has responded by moving its warships farther east, to the naval base in Novorossiysk, a port city on the Russian mainland. The effect is to push the Russian fleet farther and farther into the eastern recesses of the Black Sea—a step toward Kyiv’s long-term objective of removing the Russians from the occupied peninsula by rendering it unfeasible for operations. This combination of attrition and displacement has had the effect of diminishing the Russian fleet’s capacity to patrol the waters near the Ukrainian ports, partially relieving pressure on the international shipping lanes in the Black Sea. This could allow Kyiv to achieve another goal of these operations: opening up Odesa’s three deep-water ports to international merchant shipping for grain and other goods.
The Russian blockade of the Ukrainian ports had been alleviated by a Turkish and U.N. deal brokered in the summer of 2022 that had allowed certain amounts of Ukrainian goods—especially grain—to be exported through civilian shipping corridors. Moscow had been offered limited sanctions relief in exchange. The Kremlin withdrew from the agreement in July 2023, reestablished a blockade of all commercial shipping flowing to Odesa, and began a series of drone and missile strikes against Ukrainian grain export facilities. The cumulative effect of the blockade was to make insurance prices for shipping in and out of Ukraine spike and allow Russian grain exports to start dominating the markets. In August, Kyiv’s response was to institute an alternative humanitarian sea corridor that ran closely along the Ukrainian coast and would be protected by the navies of NATO members Bulgaria and Romania. The gamble that Russian threats to interdict shipping were a bluff and that they would not fire on internationally flagged ships paid off. By now, 32 intrepid international vessels have left Ukraine’s ports for Africa and elsewhere with their holds full of grain.
Ukraine has also undertaken successful commando raids by small teams of elite naval infantry to achieve its objectives. In Crimea, Ukraine managed to destroy or disable Russian anti-air missile installations in preparation for bombardment of the peninsula. Among other objectives, these actions allowed Ukraine to retake strategically located oil and gas drilling rigs captured by the Russians at the start of the war, which they had used for maritime radar surveillance. The fact that Kyiv only has a limited arsenal of Western-provided precision long-range missiles means that the Ukrainians have had to be very resourceful with their deployment, including by eliminating as much of Russia’s air defense as possible before launching them.
At the same time, the Ukrainians have also been successful in developing a new generation of sophisticated, locally made sea drones capable of striking past the defenses of the Russian fleet. The Russian anti-missile and traditional ship defense systems have proved incapable of offering protection against this new generation of sea drones, including the Ukrainian “Sea Baby” series of partially submerged attack drones. Representing a tiny fraction of the cost of an advanced Russian battleship, landing ship, or submarine, these relatively inexpensive and quickly constructed drones have proved themselves to be a radical innovation.
By the end of the summer, the Ukrainians had proved not only capable of sinking or maiming serious Russian naval assets, but also of making the further use of Sevastopol unsustainable for the Black Sea Fleet. The British Ministry of Defense assessed that Russia had “relocated many of its prestige assets—including cruise missile capable ships and submarines—from Sevastopol to operating and basing areas further east, such as Novorossiysk.” Furthermore, on Oct. 5, the leader of the Russian-occupied Georgian region of Abkhazia, which is located even farther east than Novorossiysk, made public statements that his Moscow-backed region would soon host a “permanent point of deployment” for the Russian Navy. Such a base would be located almost at the very eastern end of the Black Sea, suggesting that the Russians have concluded that stationing naval assets anywhere near Ukraine and its now heavily mined shoreline is untenable.
These successes have had the effect of severely restricting Russia’s range of mobility in the Black Sea. British Armed Forces Minister James Heappey said, “The functional defeat of the Black Sea Fleet, and I would argue that is what it is, because it has been forced to disperse to ports from which it cannot have an effect on Ukraine, is an enormous credit.”
Given that the total liberation of Crimea is a key objective for Kyiv, these significant Ukrainian successes must be put into the same context as the other developments in this multifront conflict—something that much of the Western press and commentariat have failed to do. By effectively dislodging the Russian Black Sea Fleet from Sevastopol and unilaterally opening a grain shipment corridor, Kyiv has achieved stunning successes with only limited naval capabilities. While Ukraine is still a long way from hoisting its flag over Simferopol, the Crimean capital, this kind of progress would have been unthinkable last year.
The success of Ukrainian naval operations against the Russian fleet has been all the more remarkable as Ukraine functionally no longer has a navy. Since 2014, the Russians have sunk, captured, or incapacitated all major Ukrainian warships except the flagship frigate Hetman Sahaidachny, which the Ukrainians themselves scuttled in early 2022 to prevent it from falling into Russian hands. Ukrainians have begun to routinely crack jokes about the mighty Russian Black Sea Fleet being sunk by a nation with no navy, but Russian naval officers are unlikely to be smiling.
The Ukrainian military has proved itself capable of incorporating new equipment into its arsenal quickly and to devastating effect—whether that be homegrown sea drones or Anglo-French-supplied missiles. If Western governments want to see more successes on the battlefield, providing Ukraine with more and longer-range missiles to continue denying Russia the freedom to move in Crimea would be a good place to start. Either way, Western observers should stop focusing only on the land war and put these remarkable Ukrainian achievements into the context they deserve. Otherwise, arguing in favor of providing Kyiv with the tools it needs to liberate its territories will be harder than it needs to be.
Foreign Policy · by Oz Katerji, Vladislav Davidzon · October 20, 2023
12. Why China And India’s Populism Threatens The World Order
Conclusion:
Whether we want to maintain this system today, is an open question. But without the West’s efforts to curtail such populist-based movements led by China, India and others, the domestic repression of minority groups is sure to continue and regional expansion is likely to occur. The threat to global peace and stability is much too great to ignore.
Why China And India’s Populism Threatens The World Order | NOEMA
The rise of India, China and Russia as “civilization-states” is setting up a new clash of civilizations, this time against their modern “nation-state” neighbors.
noemamag.com · by Haiyun Ma
Credits
Haiyun Ma is an associate professor of history at Frostburg State University specializing in Islam, the Muslims of China and China-Muslim world relations.
At the G-20 meeting in September, participants and observers were surprised by a particular dinner invitation sent on behalf of India’s president that referred to her as the “President of Bharat” — a racially tinged callback to the Indian king, Bharata, who is featured in Hindu mythology as an ancestor of the Hindu race. That same day, a tweet by a senior spokesman of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) referred to India’s Narendra Modi, who was attending a summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in Indonesia, as the “prime minister of Bharat.”
Meanwhile, on the global stage, India’s foreign minister S. Jaishankar mentioned “Bharat” twice during the 78th session of the U.N. General Assembly the same month. These name changes have sparked rumors that Modi’s BJP may change the country’s name to Bharat. A BJP leader, T. Raja Singh, recently prophesized that India will declare itself a Hindu nation by 2025. The process of Hindunizing India — and further marginalizing Muslims, Christians, Buddhists and Sikhs — is clearly underway in the BJP-led country.
A parallel cultural movement is being carried out in China. As scholars on China have long noticed, Chinese President Xi Jinping has initiated a Sinicization campaign. In addition to well-known, well-documented assimilationist policies in Xinjiang, Sinicization also targets other non-Chinese (non-Han) peoples including the Mongolians, the Hui and the Tibetans. Non-Chinese (Non-Han) ideologies and religions — including Buddhism from India, Christianity from the West, Islam from Arab states, and Marxism from Germany — have all been subject to forceful Sinicization programs such as removal of foreign-style architecture and obeisance to the governmental interpretation of religious texts or ideological doctrine in traditional Han Chinese cultural terms.
Sinicization (often misunderstood by Euro-American scholars as China-nization) is essentially the assimilation of non-Chinese ethnic minorities into the majoritarian ethnic Chinese, or Han people, a term referring to what’s considered the golden era of the Han dynasty and its subject population in history for roughly 2,200 years. Today the Han people have been euphemized and are cherished by the CCP as the Chinese people, known as zhonghua minzu, a term made popular by early-20th century Han Chinese nationalists.
All this occurs at a time when China and Russia are being treated as authoritarian, rival superpowers and India as a crucial counterweight and democratic ally. But India and China are not ordinary nation-states, they are fashioning themselves as civilization-states, striving to return to a prior period of historical glory and territorial largess by relying on their rich and ancient cultures and promoting populism. Such lines are mostly represented by India and China, but civilization-states also include Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey.
And so, contrary to Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations thesis, major civilization-states do not directly clash with one another; their geopolitical priorities are focused on regions they historically dominated or influenced, such as “Bharat” in South Asia and Shen Zhou —“continent of the gods” or “divine land” — an old and Sinocentric name for China’s territories in East Asia.
Instead, civilization-states clash with adjacent nation-states that were carved out of civilization states, such as Pakistan out of India; Ukraine out of imperialist Russia; many Arab countries out of the Ottoman empire; and Taiwan — and to a lesser degree, the Korean peninsula, Vietnam, and Ryukyu — out of China’s Sinocentric world order. It is the modern borderlands between major civilization-states and their smaller nation-state neighbors where “unification” wars or territorial disputes are underway or being prepared for, either through action or rhetoric.
Re-envisioning the new world order — and recognizing that these nation-states are civilization-states — may help us understand past wars, present tensions and possible future conflicts between civilization-states and their nation-state neighbors as well as with their Western allies.
The People’s Leaders
In the modern era, the party or state leaders of these multi-ethnic civilization-states have moved beyond their own established institutions and directly involved themselves in their country’s majoritarian populace and its cultural movements in order to gain influence and access to power. As an eight-year-old, Modi had already joined the local branch of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (known as the National Volunteer Corps or RSS), a right-wing Hindu nationalist militia organization in Gujarat.
Modi also portrays himself as a devout Hindu, and his devotion towards Hinduism, especially Lord Shiva, is well known. By participating in the majoritarian people’s organization and religion, RSS and Hinduism have become the best paths to political power in a populist era.
“Contrary to Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations thesis, major civilization-states do not directly clash with one another; their geopolitical priorities are focused on regions they historically dominated or influenced.”
As if to exemplify the intertwining of spirituality and politics, Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, a journalist focusing on India’s right-wing politics, mentioned in his book “Narendra Modi The Man, The Times” that Modi said to him,“I went to the Vivekananda Ashram in Almora. I loitered a lot in the Himalayas. I had some influences of spiritualism at that time along with the sentiment of patriotism — it was all mixed. It is not possible to delineate the two ideas.”
Modi’s early involvement with RSS and later the BJP and his embracement of a type of extremist politicized Hinduism known as Hindutva appealed to the majoritarian Hindu population, paving his way to power. In return, Modi and his BJP party have become more Hindu nationalistic than any prior modern-era ruling party.
Although Xi rose to power as a result of party appointment, he has long understood the power of the majoritarian Han population and their social-cultural movements. At the age of 15, Xi was involved in a mass social-cultural movement against the established institutions known as the Cultural Revolution that occurred during the 1960s and 1970s.
He was sent to a village, Liangjiahe in the Shaanxi province where he soon became Liangjiahe village’s party secretary. It is said that here was where Xi spearheaded a series of initiatives around well digging to help provide drinking water and efforts to make land arable for local peasants. His devotion and contribution to the community’s well-being shaped his charismatic portrayal as “the man of the people.” Today, Liangjiahe village is an open-air shrine to Xi meant to demonstrate his close relations with the people.
After the Chinese Communist Party appointed Xi as Hu Jintao’s successor in 2012, Xi claimed that the people are the creators of the nation’s history and the fundamental forces that determine its future and the destiny of the Chinese Communist Party. Beyond state apparatus and institutions, Xi has imitated Mao Zedong’s practices of mobilizing mass populations and taken a people-centric philosophy and approach to power consolidation and party-state building over the last decade: Those efforts include an anti-corruption campaign that has encouraged citizens to report on corrupt officials; the launch of a people’s war against terrorism; promises of an egalitarian society and common prosperity for all; and a new anti-spying law in 2023 that urges China’s citizens to seek out and report on foreign spies.
Like Modi’s RSS supporters, Xi’s followers are known as xiao fenhong, “little pink” fans, and constitute the strongest supporters of his leadership both online and offline.
Restoring History’s Civilization-State
Drawing on their respective long histories and rich cultures, Modi’s India and Xi’s China have utilized historical writings, cultural performances and cartography to make their state more civilization-like than nation-like. Modi’s BJP party has equated modern India with ancient Bharat by promoting Hinduism and demoting non-Hindu minority religious-cultural practices.
Externally, Modi and his BJP have portrayed Hindu/Bharatiya cultures as peaceful and harmonious. In 2014, Modi put forth a resolution at the United Nations General Assembly asking other nations to recognize June 21 as the “International Day of Yoga” and to identify India as the spiritual birthplace of yoga. Modi claimed that yoga was “an invaluable gift of [India’s] ancient tradition” and indicated Yoga and, by expansion, Hinduism, can contribute to solving current world issues such as climate change and conflicts. Co-sponsored by 170 member states, the UNGA adopted the resolution.
On International Yoga Day, even the Indian army performs yoga on the world’s highest-known battle site, Siachen Glacier. In reality, India’s support for International Yoga Day — like China’s effort to proliferate the Confucius Institute, which spread from its establishment in 2004 to more than 140 countries by 2017 — is aimed at projecting traditional cultural influence on a global level.
Modi and the BJP’s promotion of Hinduism as tied to India goes hand in hand with his appetite for geographic expansion. In 2019, the BJP-led India corrected what it called a “historical blunder,”: It revoked nearly all of Article 370 of the Indian Constitution that granted Kashmir a certain political and legal autonomy by allowing it to have its own constitution and flag. India’s territorial ambitions, however, do not stop at disputed regions. In 2023, Modi’s BJP installed a mural of Akhand Bharat on India’s new parliament building, which featured an undivided India that includes the sovereign nation-states Pakistan, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Nepal.
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“Modi’s India and Xi’s China have utilized historical writings, cultural performances and cartography to make their state more civilization-like than nation-like.”
Even more recently, Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs Mélanie Joly spoke of the assassination of a Sikh separatist activist and Canadian citizen as a “grave violation” of Canada’s sovereignty “if proven true.” The FBI subsequently warned American Sikh activists of potential threats to their lives by India’s government. The alleged Canadian assassination and the U.S. warning suggest that the Hindutva BJP’s war against non-Hindu separatists and activists is transnational and lethal and that it is willing to violate the sovereignty of its Western allies to accomplish its goals. The spillover of Hindutva and its hatred of Muslims also resulted in a suspected Hindu extremist allegedly burning a Quran in Naperville, Illinois this summer.
Early in Xi’s presidency, he promised to rejuvenate the Chinese nation, or essentially, make China’s civilization-state great again. In contrast to the earlier CCP’s attack on ancient Chinese cultures under Mao Zedong (1949-1976) and the CCP’s tolerance toward foreign and non-Han cultures in Deng Xiaoping’s time (1978-1989), Xi has supported an emphasis on teaching ancient Han/Chinese history by standardizing the historical curriculum for compulsory education in 2022.
A history school at the University of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences was also established under Xi’s guidance for studying and propagating ancient Han Chinese history and culture. And Xi personally approved the construction of China’s National Archives of Publications and Culture, which were built in 2022; the investment resembled the Qing-era’s establishment of libraries and collections of texts in the late 18th century.
Xi has also demanded that Chinese archeologists redouble efforts to trace China’s history as far back as possible to emphasize the country’s ancient history and culture and imbue nationalist pride through the un-earthing of treasures from the early and mythological Xia dynasty.
Meanwhile, China’s cultural assimilation of minority populations is equally repressive and geared toward glorifying the Han people. China’s efforts to eradicate colonial legacies and influence in Hong Kong, to reunify with Taiwan and its historical ownership or “historically mine” claim in territorial disputes in the South China Sea, as well as its claim that the “East is rising and West declining,” all reflect its ambition and efforts to revive the renown of its ancient civilization and recover territories it lost to modern nation-states.
Demonstrations of traditional Chinese culture as reflective of its long history have grown. In May, Xi held a summit with Central Asian leaders in Xi’an, one of the ancient imperial capitals, arranging a grand Tang-dynasty style opening ceremony for the first time that included a performance and procession in the newly built Tang Furong Garden. The opening ceremony of the Asian Games in Hangzhou last month was intentionally scheduled on Qiufen or the autumnal equinox — a traditional Chinese farmer’s harvest day — and featured a theme of “Tides Surging in Asia”; on show was a jade bird and other jade items discovered in the ancient Liangzhu culture as far back as roughly 5,300 years ago.
To promote the influence of traditional Chinese civilization globally, Xi initiated a global civilization dialogue, suggesting a new world order that is centered on civilizations, with China being a major one along with Greece, Egypt, Persia and India. From the civilization-state’s perspective, one could conclude that the rest of the world’s countries, especially modern nation-states, are comparably young and therefore culturally lacking. The implication, among these civilization-states, is that these supposedly less-civilized Western nation-states have no rights or legitimacy to apply their rules and laws (over issues like human rights), or their democratic ideologies, to ancient civilization-states.
China’s territorial claims are largely based on historical boundaries and nationalistic sentiments. Xi and prior leaders have often claimed that there has been a great yearning for unity and stability among the Chinese people throughout its history. Chinese government propaganda states that reuniting Taiwan with the motherland is the supposed shared will and aspiration of the 1.4 billion Chinese people. The Chinese government’s newly released map of China, or “Standard Map” for 2023, claims swathes of neighboring territories, including the entire Bolshoi Ussuriysky Island (which had been divided between China and Russia), Taiwan and the South China Sea — the last being a claim that dates back about 2,000 years to the time of the Han dynasty.
Clashes With The Nation-State
India’s transformations from a secular, multicultural state in the late 1940s and the BJP’s Hindunization process today have intensified domestic violence against non-Hindu populations. Hindu supremacists’ violence against minority populations, notably Muslims, Christians and Sikhs has become routine, particularly in Hindu-dominated states in India.
“The implication is that these supposedly less-civilized Western nation-states have no rights or legitimacy to apply their rules and laws or their democratic ideologies, to ancient civilization-states.”
Not only have Hindu nationalists suppressed non-Hindu minorities domestically, but they have also developed an expansionist dream in the historical domain of South Asia as illustrated by the mural on India’s parliament. These expansionist behaviors have riled smaller sovereign nation-state neighbors, raising concerns about India’s territorial claim and expansion, especially in Bangladesh and Pakistan.
The Chinese maritime disputes in the South China Sea, especially disputes over the ownership of specific reefs with the Philippines, are most representative of this civilization-state assertion. Beijing’s rejection of the International Tribunal’s 2016 ruling in the South China Sea case, which determined that China’s land reclamation activities in Philippine waters were unlawful, was a challenge to the Philippines’ sovereignty rights over an Exclusive Economic Zone and breach of the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.
These (re)emerging civilization-states view their current nation-state status as imposed on them by the West. And the smaller neighboring nation-states, which used to be affiliated with or included in a dominant civilization, as modern-era creations that came at the expense of civilization-states. For example, to Modi and his BJP, the inception of India’s modern nation-state existence was representative of the “shackles of colonialism,” given that the British empire determined its modern boundaries and divided it up into several countries, including Pakistan and Bangladesh. Meanwhile, the formation and expansion of the modern nation-state system brought a “Century of Humiliation” to China, according to the government, beginning with the British invasion in the 1840s and ending with the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.
The re-rise of civilization-states India and China has increased the likelihood of conflicts with their neighbors. Just like Putin’s invasions of Georgia and Ukraine and its annexation of parts of their territories, Xi’s “Asia for Asians” mantra and Modi’s ambition of restoring India’s sphere of inference in the Indian Ocean constitute a kind of civilizational doctrine that seeks exclusive dominance or influence in East Asia and South Asia, respectively, much like the U.S.’s “Monroe Doctrine.”
For the U.S., Japan and Europe, allying themselves with one civilization-state, India, for the sake of containing another, China, in the Asia Pacific, is narrow-minded and shortsighted, setting the stage for future geopolitical power struggles. Just like the West’s failed engagement with China for the sake of containing the Soviets, beginning in the 1980s, the West’s alliance with India will similarly fail and birth a new future challenger to it.
To protect against the expansionist aspirations of these civilization-states, Western nation-states, especially, should strengthen their economic, political and security ties with countries neighboring China, Russia and India. The West’s inclusion of smaller Baltic nation-states in NATO after the collapse of the Soviet Union and more recently, with the addition of Finland, prevented Russia from moving its territory westward.
In contrast, the failure to include Ukraine in NATO after promising it in the Bucharest Summit Declaration in 2008 emboldened and may have even invited Russian invasions. Meanwhile, the U.S.’s alliance with South Korea, Japan and possibly Vietnam and even North Korea in the future, may also help protect the sovereignty and security of these smaller nations.
In South Asia, however, the West’s neglect of India’s smaller neighbors, like Pakistan and Bangladesh, may only serve to boost India’s civilization-state ambitions in the region and endanger the sovereignty and security of these smaller nation-states and the larger nation-state-based international order.
With these somewhat contradicting goals in mind, Western leaders must rethink the politics and implications of this emerging world order from a civilization-state versus nation-state lens rather than the historical authoritarianism versus democracy perspective. The West must strengthen its relationship with neglected small nation-states and re-adjust its relations with civilization-states; doing so may be crucial to reduce or prevent potential social and political upheaval, or even war, especially in South and East Asia.
For many thousands of years, from the Buddhist Maurya empire to the empires of the Ottomans, Safavids, Mughals and the era of Europe’s Crusades, civilization-states have attempted to conquer territory and convert people through a mix of political spiritualism that has made a resurgence today. The inception of the modern nation-state had helped bring some stability to the world order, with states acting as equal sovereign nations helping to regulate and maintain a broad nation-state-based international order.
Whether we want to maintain this system today, is an open question. But without the West’s efforts to curtail such populist-based movements led by China, India and others, the domestic repression of minority groups is sure to continue and regional expansion is likely to occur. The threat to global peace and stability is much too great to ignore.
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noemamag.com · by Haiyun Ma
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
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