Korea has not been the only battleground since the end of the Second World War. Men have fought and died in Malaya, in Greece, in the Philippines, in Algeria and Cuba and Cyprus, and almost continuously on the Indo-Chinese Peninsula. No nuclear weapons have been fired. No massive nuclear retaliation has been considered appropriate. This is another type of war, new in its intensity, ancient in its origin--war by guerrillas, subversives, insurgents, assassins, war by ambush instead of by combat; by infiltration, instead of aggression, seeking victory by eroding and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him. It is a form of warfare uniquely adapted to what has been strangely called "wars of liberation," to undermine the efforts of new and poor countries to maintain the freedom that they have finally achieved. It preys on economic unrest and ethnic conflicts. It requires in those situations where we must counter it, and these are the kinds of challenges that will be before us in the next decade if freedom is to be saved, a whole new kind of strategy, a wholly different kind of force, and therefore a new and wholly different kind of military training.

John F. Kennedy, 35th President of the U.S.

Remarks at West Point to the Graduating Class of the U.S. Military Academy, June 06, 1962

Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

Army Times editorial on May 28, 1979. In “Special Forces: No More Hot-Dogging,” Fry’s message was simple: Special Forces must support conventional forces, “helping them prepare for and win the big one by quiet professionalism, not by being aggressive and brash.” “We still tell it like it is but we do it in a constructive manner, get the message across … We believe we are going to exist as Special Forces and if our Army is going to be prepared to defend our nation, we need each other. Quiet Professionalism really works.”

– Learn more about COL Fry at https://arsof-history.org/icons/fry.html

“Happy people can zoom out to see, and fully enjoy the world around them. But that means standing up to the lie that you are the center of things. That is the essence of humility and a great secret to happiness.”

– Arthur C. Brooks.

"Don't explain your philosophy. Embody it."

– Epictetus

1. Open Source Intelligence Strategy

2. U.S. Allows Ukraine to Carry Out Limited Strikes Inside Russia With American Weapons

3. The Unusual Espionage Act Case Against a Drone Photographer

4. Israel could have used smaller weapons against Hamas to avoid deaths in Gaza tent fire, experts say

5. U.S., Chinese Defense Chiefs Confirm Plan to Reopen Hotlines in First Face-to-Face Meeting

6. Trump is trending on Chinese social media, and many are rejoicing

7. Taking the Fight to Russia: The West Weighs Ukraine’s Use of Its Weapons

8. Behind the scenes of the Pentagon’s race to aid in Taiwan’s defense

9. Stress Test: the April Earthquake and Taiwan’s Resilience

10. This ‘Cowboy’ Wants to Teach Princeton Kids About Greatness

11. US Intel says North Korean missile debris identified in Russian attack on Kharkiv: report

12. Why Trying to 'Defeat' the Chinese Communist Party Could Backfire

13. IDF unearths more tunnels, gains control of Philadelphi Corridor

14. Americans Are Thinking About Immigration All Wrong

15. Off Leash: Inside the Secret, Global, Far-Right Group Chat

16. How Myanmar’s civil war is rippling into the U.S. and around the world

17. US military conducts tunnel warfare exercise in Morocco

18. China's defence ministry condemns US missile deployment in Philippines

19. Five powers plan bigger, deeper Asia military drills

20. Ice Dragon: China’s Antarctic Strategy

21. Myanmar Is Fragmenting—but Not Falling Apart

22. New Cold War proxy conflict brewing in Myanmar

1. Open Source Intelligence Strategy

The 11 page strategy can be downloaded here https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/INR-Open-Source-Intelligence-Strategy.pdf

I have long been a believer in open source information. That is why I provide my daily distribution to a very long list of addresses (which I have been doing since 1996). I have long believed that the press and journalists are among the best open source information. I would submit that journalists are among the best "collectors" who know how to elicit information from sources.

Open Source Intelligence Strategy

BUREAU OF INTELLIGENCE AND RESEARCH

DOWNLOAD OPEN SOURCE INTELLIGENCE STRATEGY [5 MB]

From the Assistant Secretary

The explosion of open source intelligence (OSINT) in recent years has transformed how governments and people around the world consume and process information about society and global issues. The abundance and accessibility of OSINT has made it an essential source of data to enrich intelligence analysis, inform U.S. diplomats and policymakers, and enable intelligence diplomacy. In this new era, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) must harness the power and potential of OSINT to empower American diplomacy.

To realize this vision, I am pleased to share INR’s inaugural OSINT strategy. The new INR OSINT Strategy is a key part of our modernization agenda and complements the broader Intelligence Community OSINT Strategy 2024-2026. The INR OSINT Strategy focuses on developing sound governance and policy guidance regarding the use of OSINT, investing in OSINT capabilities and resources, strengthening OSINT training and analytic tradecraft, and deepening cooperation on OSINT with allies and partners, industry, academia, and other nongovernmental entities. Together, these actions will help INR realize the full potential of OSINT in an efficient, secure, and responsible manner while continuing to deliver expert insights to U.S. diplomats and State Department officials worldwide.

Brett M. Holmgren

Assistant Secretary

Bureau of Intelligence and Research

Department of State

1. CONTEXT

The proliferation of open source intelligence (OSINT)—defined in the Intelligence Community (IC) OSINT Strategy 2024-2026 as intelligence derived exclusively from publicly or commercially available information that addresses specific intelligence priorities, requirements, or gaps—is transforming how the U.S. IC, including the Department of State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), operates. In INR, open source information is an invaluable resource—enriching analytic assessments, driving intelligence diplomacy, and giving U.S. diplomats worldwide greater access to INR products at lower classification levels. The demand for INR products and services at the unclassified level will only grow in the coming years, as commercial technologies generate more open source data and as the United States seeks to share more information with traditional and non-traditional partners to support and enable U.S. diplomacy.

Against this backdrop, INR created the Open Source Coordination Unit in 2022 to capitalize on the rapidly evolving OSINT landscape. The Unit, which sits in INR’s Office of Analytic Integration, established initial operating capability in 2023. The purpose of the Open Source Coordination Unit is to empower INR to use open source information more efficiently, effectively, and responsibly. We envision a future where, by meeting the demands of our diplomatic community, expanding accessibility to INR products and services, and responding quickly to fast-moving events in the world, OSINT provides strategic insights and information advantage to U.S. diplomats and policymakers.

2. STRATEGIC GOALS

To achieve our OSINT vision, we have established four strategic goals. These goals align with INR’s 2025 Strategic Plan and the IC OSINT Strategy 2024-2026.

Establish Governance and Policy for OSINT Use: Establish and adopt effective governance, policies, standards, and procedures regarding the use of OSINT in INR research and production, consistent with Executive Order 12333 and other applicable legal and policy requirements.
Invest in OSINT Capabilities: Develop and execute budget planning, acquisition, deployment, and adoption strategies for commercially available data, tools, and platforms to fill information gaps and empower all-source analysts.
Strengthen OSINT Training and Tradecraft: Develop formal training, workforce development initiatives, and analytic support channels to advance research and production using OSINT.
Deepen Collaboration with Allies, Partners, Industry, Academia, and Other Nongovernmental Entities: Strengthen collaboration on open source intelligence and research with a wide range of government and nongovernmental entities to share best practices and stay current with the latest technology, tradecraft, resources, and trends.

GOAL 1: Establish Governance and Policy for OSINT Use

OSINT has always informed the IC’s understanding of issues around the globe. However, recent advances within the discipline and INR—including new technologies and policy empowering INR analysts to produce unclassified assessments—highlight the need for tradecraft standards, policies, and procedures to govern how INR acquires and uses open source information consistent with Executive Order 12333 and other applicable legal and policy requirements.

To achieve this goal, INR will pursue the following lines of effort:

Develop Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) and Best Practices
Establish an INR OSINT Working Group comprising experts from analytic, operational, and support functions.
Develop policies and procedures for the use of open source information that implement applicable legal and policy requirements—in particular, the safeguarding of privacy and civil liberties.
Establish SOPs to facilitate analytic production at the lowest level of classification possible using OSINT.
Develop guidance on producing unclassified assessments or other products that rely solely on open source data.
Promote INR OSINT Equities in IC Policy and Guidance
Coordinate with the National Open Source Committee (NOSC) to align with IC policies, standards, procedures, and other guidance as appropriate. Promote INR equities in the development of this guidance.
Monitor and Evaluate OSINT-Derived Production
Establish measures to assess the impact of OSINT-derived unclassified production.
Track OSINT citations in INR analytic production.

GOAL 2: Invest in OSINT Capabilities

Advances in the academic and commercial sectors and the development of government-provided tools offer the potential to reduce the time required to exploit open source information. These advances enable new data science insights using innovative analytic methods and capabilities and accelerate the delivery of relevant data to INR analysts.

To achieve this goal, INR will pursue the following lines of effort:

Acquire and Develop OSINT Data and Tools
Identify and regularly update INR’s OSINT requirements.
Work with the NOSC to maximize the pooling of resources for and knowledge on open source data acquisition.
Engage with industry and government partners to stay current on OSINT trends that will inform INR acquisition decisions.
Use Department of State and IC data catalogs to facilitate information sharing on open source data capabilities.
Make any necessary technology enhancements to support INR’s ability to access relevant open source data feeds.
Acquire and deploy non-enterprise network (NEN) machines to facilitate access to specialized tools.
Identify core open source datasets and information platforms to promote consistency across INR products.
Seek and secure funding for OSINT programs.
Pursue tools to enhance analysis, collaboration, and open source information sharing.
Administer Resources, Manage Knowledge, and Deploy Data and Tools
Administer and oversee use of OSINT data, platforms, and tools in INR.
Provide guidance on and support effective and appropriate use of OSINT data, platforms, and tools, with due consideration for the safeguarding of privacy and civil liberties.
Develop mechanisms to regularly share with INR’s workforce important updates in the OSINT field, as well as recent OSINT products from within and outside of the IC.
Develop and maintain a curated online resource guide for OSINT information available to INR, including data, platforms, analytic methods, tools, and relevant policies, standards, and procedures.

GOAL 3: Strengthen OSINT Training and Tradecraft

Collecting, reviewing, structuring, and analyzing open source information requires technical and methodological skills that take time and effort to acquire, refine, and maintain. INR will need a dedicated, sustained training program to ensure the workforce can optimize its use of OSINT.

To achieve this goal, INR will pursue the following lines of effort:

Facilitate Open Source Training and Tradecraft
Facilitate in-house education on research and analytic techniques using open source data.
Develop a curriculum of OSINT research, analysis, and production courses, leveraging existing IC and private sector offerings.
Establish guidelines to distinguish between OSINT and open source research.
Provide Training and Guidance on Unclassified Production and Analysis
Maintain an expert consultation mechanism for analysts looking to incorporate open source data and advanced analytic methods into products.
Provide in-house training on the use of OSINT in unclassified assessments and other unclassified products.
Improve product dissemination for unclassified production by regularly posting products on INR’s unclassified online distribution platform (Tempo).
Periodically provide refresher guidance on the safe, secure, ethical, and legal use of OSINT, including the safeguarding of privacy and civil liberties.
Organize internal seminars to provide a venue for analysts to present on the use and impact of open source information in their work.

GOAL 4: Deepen Collaboration with Allies, Partners, Industry, Academia, and Other Nongovernmental Entities

Many U.S. Government agencies and international allies and partners devote significant resources to collecting and analyzing OSINT in support of intelligence assessments and other products. Academia, the private sector, and other nongovernmental entities are investing heavily in new technologies and pioneering new approaches to the application of open source information to support a wide range of academic, business, journalistic, and general research and analysis functions. INR must foster new and deepen existing partnerships in the IC, the Department of State, other U.S. Government agencies, industry, academia, and other nongovernmental entities to take advantage of existing open source data capabilities and resources, stay current on emerging technologies and tools, and adopt best practices for open source research and analysis.

To achieve this goal, INR will pursue the following lines of effort:

Strengthen IC Partnerships
Participate in NOSC activities.
Maintain regular contact with partner agencies to foster resource and data sharing.
Participate in exchanges with IC OSINT practitioners, including inviting analysts to present data, methods, and tools to INR and encouraging joint duty assignments.
Develop International Partnerships
Maintain regular communication with like-minded allies and partners working on OSINT.
Exchange best practices with allies and partners and cooperate on OSINT tools and capabilities.
Increase Intra-Departmental Coordination and Cooperation With Other U.S. Government Agencies
Establish a process for coordinating and collaborating with other bureaus in the Department of State to encourage information sharing, minimize redundancies, and nurture relationships between those bureaus and the IC.
Develop and administer a process for State Department clients to propose requirements for unclassified OSINT-derived analysis and other INR products.
Develop Partnerships With Academia, Industry, and Nongovernmental Entities
Strengthen ties with OSINT practitioners in academia, the private sector, think tanks, and civil society organizations.
Identify opportunities to collaborate with the private sector and academic institutions to gather, structure, clean, and analyze publicly available data.

Open Source Intelligence Strategy [5 MB]

2. U.S. Allows Ukraine to Carry Out Limited Strikes Inside Russia With American Weapons

Excerpts:

“The president recently directed his team to ensure that Ukraine is able to use U.S.-supplied weapons for counter-fire purposes in the Kharkiv region so Ukraine can hit back against Russian forces that are attacking them or preparing to attack them,” a U.S. official said. “Our policy with respect to prohibiting the use of ATACMS or long-range strikes inside of Russia has not changed.”

The policy shift was earlier reported Thursday by Politico.

The weapons the U.S. will allow the Ukrainians to use in the Kharkiv region include the Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System, or GMLRS, and High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or Himars, and artillery systems, U.S. officials said.

The U.S. had since the conflict began in February 2022 declined to allow any U.S.-supplied weapons to be used to target forces inside Russia. Ukraine has been allowed to strike targets in Crimea because it is within Ukraine’s internationally recognized borders and Washington says that Moscow’s annexation of the peninsula is illegal.

U.S. Allows Ukraine to Carry Out Limited Strikes Inside Russia With American Weapons

But Washington still rules out use of long-range ATACMS missiles beyond Ukraine’s borders

https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/u-s-allows-ukraine-to-strike-inside-russia-with-american-weapons-72a3f8a1?mod=hp_lead_pos9

By Gordon Lubold

Follow and Michael R. Gordon

Updated May 30, 2024 7:06 pm ET

Rescuers at the site of a rocket strike near Kharkiv, Ukraine, on Thursday. PHOTO: SERGEY KOZLOV/SHUTTERSTOCK

WASHINGTON—In a significant policy reversal, the Biden administration on Thursday said for the first time that it would allow Ukrainian forces to do limited targeting with American-supplied weapons inside Russia.

The new policy will allow Ukrainian forces to use artillery and fire short-range rockets from Himars launchers against command posts, arms depots and other assets on Russian territory that are being used by Russian forces to carry out its attack on Kharkiv in northeastern Ukraine. But the policy doesn’t give Ukraine permission to use longer-range ATACMS surface-to-surface missiles inside Russia.

The narrow geographic scope represents an effort by the Biden administration to help Ukraine better defend against Russia’s continuing offensive while limiting the risk that the conflict in Ukraine could escalate into a direct clash between Washington and Moscow.

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Early in its invasion of Ukraine, Moscow lagged behind Kyiv in the use of low-cost explosive drones. WSJ explains how Russia is now expanding its drone arsenal, posing a major threat for Ukraine. Photo composite: Planet Labs PBC; VGTRK

“The president recently directed his team to ensure that Ukraine is able to use U.S.-supplied weapons for counter-fire purposes in the Kharkiv region so Ukraine can hit back against Russian forces that are attacking them or preparing to attack them,” a U.S. official said. “Our policy with respect to prohibiting the use of ATACMS or long-range strikes inside of Russia has not changed.”

The policy shift was earlier reported Thursday by Politico.

The weapons the U.S. will allow the Ukrainians to use in the Kharkiv region include the Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System, or GMLRS, and High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or Himars, and artillery systems, U.S. officials said.

The U.S. had since the conflict began in February 2022 declined to allow any U.S.-supplied weapons to be used to target forces inside Russia. Ukraine has been allowed to strike targets in Crimea because it is within Ukraine’s internationally recognized borders and Washington says that Moscow’s annexation of the peninsula is illegal.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken, traveling in Eastern Europe, signaled Wednesday that the administration was open to adjusting its policy proscribing the use of American weapons to strike Russia, but the new policy switch didn’t come until Thursday.

The Ukrainians made the request to use American-supplied weapons on targets inside Russia on May 13 as Moscow pressed its offensive in northeast Ukraine. Because of Kharkiv’s proximity to Russian territory, the Russian military has been able to fire across the border knowing that it couldn’t be struck by Western-supplied arms.

Following that appeal, national security adviser Jake Sullivan, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Gen. CQ Brown Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, agreed that the U.S. policy be adjusted and a formal recommendation was made to President Biden on May 15.

Biden also conferred that day with Gen. Christopher Cavoli, NATO’s supreme allied commander, Austin and Sullivan and instructed them to work out the details. On May 17, Blinken backed the new approach in a meeting with Biden and Sullivan following his trip to Kyiv.

The U.S. policy change, which will enable Ukraine to strike Russian targets just over the Russia-Ukraine border, came after British Foreign Secretary David Cameron and French President Emmanuel Macron said they would remove the prohibition on the use of arms supplied by their nations against targets in Russia. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg also said earlier this week that Western nations needed to consider lifting such restrictions.

In providing Ukraine with new flexibility, some Western officials have sought to define the circumstances in which Ukraine could be permitted to use the weapons. Macron, for example, has said that French-supplied weapons might be used to strike missile sites in Russia that were being used to attack Ukraine.

Russia has repeatedly warned the U.S. and other Western nations against providing longer-range missiles like the ATACMS to Ukraine and has hinted at retaliation.

“Constant escalation can lead to serious consequences,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday.

But American officials say that it is Russia that has escalated the fighting by turning to North Korea for ballistic missiles and to Iran for one-way attack drones.

Write to Gordon Lubold at gordon.lubold@wsj.com and Michael R. Gordon at michael.gordon@wsj.com

3. The Unusual Espionage Act Case Against a Drone Photographer

The Unusual Espionage Act Case Against a Drone Photographer

In seemingly the first case of its kind, the US Justice Department has charged a Chinese national with using a drone to photograph a Virginia shipyard where the US Navy was assembling nuclear submarines.

Wired · by Jordan Pearson · May 30, 2024

The United States Department of Justice is quietly prosecuting a novel Espionage Act case involving a drone, a Chinese national, and classified nuclear submarines.

The case is such a rarity that it appears to be the first known prosecution under a World War II–era law that bans photographing vital military installations using aircraft, showing how new technologies are leading to fresh national security and First Amendment issues.

“This is definitely not something that the law has addressed to any significant degree,” Emily Berman, a law professor at the University of Houston who specializes in national security, tells WIRED. “There’s definitely no reported cases.”

On January 5, 2024, Fengyun Shi flew to Virginia while on leave from his graduate studies at the University of Minnesota and rented a Tesla at the airport. His research focused on using AI to detect signs of crop disease in photos. Shi’s subject that week wasn’t plants, however, but allegedly the local shipyards—the only ones manufacturing the latest generation of Navy carrier ships in the country, and nuclear submarines as well.

According to an affidavit filed by FBI special agent Sara Shalowitz in February, a shipyard security officer alerted the Naval Criminal Investigative Service to Shi’s actions. The affidavit alleges that on January 6, Shi was flying a drone in “inclement weather” before it got stuck in a neighbor’s tree. When Shi, who is a Chinese citizen, approached the neighbor for help, he was questioned about his nationality and purpose for being in the area. The unnamed resident took photos of Shi, his license plate, and his ID, and called the police. The affidavit alleges that Shi was “very nervous” when questioned by police and “did not have any real reasons” for flying a drone in bad weather. The police gave Shi the number for the fire department and said he would need to stay on the scene. Instead, he returned the rental car an hour later and left Hampton Roads, Virginia, abandoning the drone.

When the FBI seized the drone and pulled the photos off its memory card, they discovered images that special agent Shalowitz said she recognized as being taken at Newport News Shipyard and BAE Systems, which is a 45-minute drive away. The affidavit states that on the day Shi took the photos, the Newport News Shipyard was “actively manufacturing” aircraft carriers and Virginia class nuclear submarines.

“Naval aircraft carriers have classified and sensitive systems throughout the carriers,” the affidavit states. “The nuclear submarines present on that date also have highly classified and sensitive Navy Nuclear Propulsion Information (‘NNPI’) and those submarines even in the design and construction phase are sensitive and classified.”

The DOJ is charging Shi with six Espionage Act misdemeanors under two statutes: one banning photographing a vital military installation and one banning the use of an aircraft to do so. Each misdemeanor can result in up to a year in prison upon conviction. While he awaits trial, Shi is restricted to living in Virginia under probation. He was forced to surrender his passport. According to court filings, he appears to require a translator.

Shi’s case, filed in federal court in Virginia’s Eastern District, was first spotted by Court Watch in February. Its rarity became apparent in March, after prosecutors filed a motion for a time extension. The judge agreed, writing that it was justified because the case is “so unusual due to the nature of the prosecution and the novel questions of both law and fact.”

Indeed, Shi is being charged “under two statutes which have been rarely prosecuted” to the degree that “the Court has been able to only find one reported case,” the judge wrote. That case, Genovese v. Town of Southampton, centered on just one of the two statutes Shi is being charged under—photographing a military installation, without an aircraft.

The DOJ declined to comment when WIRED posed questions about Shi’s case, including whether the Chinese government is being engaged on the issue.

According to a filing from US prosecutors, both parties wish to end the case in a plea agreement. Shi’s attorney did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

WIRED found multiple social media accounts connected to Shi. He appears to have a small online footprint and few interactions with others online, portraying a life of quiet normalcy. He appears to be a soccer fan who enjoys campus and is a devoted League of Legends player. He even attended the competitive online game’s 2022 World Championship tournament in San Francisco. In fact, according to online records, he often plays League of Legends multiple times a day while awaiting trial in Virginia. His university research is similarly innocuous: He’s developing an app for detecting crop diseases in photos called Gopher Eye, which is being funded by the National Science Foundation, and has applied for a patent. He describes himself as a “startup manager” on LinkedIn.

One of Shi’s colleagues at the University of Minnesota, who spoke to WIRED under the condition of anonymity, says that he was a “typical” kid who was “very passionate” about his research. In the fall of 2023, however, financial and familial strife compounded by mounting pressure from lagging grades led to a break. The colleague said that Shi soon all but disappeared, taking leave from his studies and “basically hiding from all of his normal relationships.” He’s been difficult to contact since then, they say, adding that they did not know that Shi is currently in the US—much less embroiled in a rare national security case.

“From my point of view, he’s had very bad luck,” they say. “I don’t think that he did anything wrong intentionally.”

The question of why the DOJ is prosecuting Shi in the first place looms large over his case. After all, satellites originating in China photograph the US daily, including military sites and aircraft carriers. The degree to which Shi’s nationality played a role in the DOJ’s decision to prosecute the case isn’t clear. The case is proceeding amid rising animosity between China and the US, but Shi isn’t being charged under any laws related to collecting intelligence for a foreign government. He is not being accused of acting as a spy. His only alleged crime is taking photos with a drone.

“The Justice Department has guidelines that say [nationality] is not supposed to play a role in a criminal investigation, but there are exceptions to that rule for national security and border-related investigations,” Berman says. “It certainly seems likely that the fact Shi is a Chinese national raises red flags for investigators that wouldn't necessarily go up in the same way if he was an American citizen, rightly or wrongly.”

Cases prosecuted under statutes banning photographing military bases can have implications for First Amendment rights, Berman says. Photographing in a public place is a constitutionally protected activity.

“It would be a good thing to litigate some of these cases and clarify what the rules actually are about what you can and can't do,” she says. “Any time there is uncertainty, that may make people hesitant to do things that they are constitutionally entitled to do.”

The few occasions where statutes banning photographing military installations have come up illustrate this concern. In Genovese v. Town of Southampton, Nancy Genovese sued law enforcement officials who arrested her for photographing an airport—part of which was a military base—while having guns in her car. A jury agreed that law enforcement was maliciously prosecuting Genovese, and she landed a settlement amounting to more than $1 million in 2016. In another incident, in 2014, reporters for The Blade in Ohio filed a federal lawsuit after they were unlawfully detained for taking photos outside a military base. In that case, too, the law favored the plaintiffs, and the reporters were awarded $18,000.

Shi’s case is scheduled to start on June 20.

Wired · by Jordan Pearson · May 30, 2024

4. Israel could have used smaller weapons against Hamas to avoid deaths in Gaza tent fire, experts say

With all due respect to former military personnel but we need to be careful about second guessing the man in the arena and armchair quarterbacking.

Excerpts:

The Israelis have previously deployed drones to launch weapons that are smaller and more precise, Cancian said. These precision airstrikes used over the years have caused little damage beyond the immediate target.

Israel, for example, in this strike could have used a smaller anti-personnel weapon called the mini-Spike, which would not have created as wide an area of debris, if it was targeting specific Hamas leaders, Cancian said.

...

Sunday’s strike shows that even the smaller 250-pound bombs the U.S. has continued to provide can be too large for use near densely packed refugee areas, Cancian said.

Israel could have used smaller weapons against Hamas to avoid deaths in Gaza tent fire, experts say

BY TARA COPP AND JOSEF FEDERMAN

Updated 7:28 PM EDT, May 30, 2024

AP · by TARA COPP · May 30, 2024

1 of 5 |FILE - Palestinians fleeing from the southern Gaza city of Rafah during an Israeli ground and air offensive in the city, May 28, 2024. Defense experts who’ve reviewed debris images from an Israeli airstrike that ignited a deadly fire in a camp for displaced Palestinians question why Israel didn’t use smaller, more precise weapons when so many civilians were nearby. (AP Photo/Jehad Alshrafi, File)

JOSEF FEDERMAN

TARA COPP

Copp covers the Pentagon and national security for the Associated Press. She has reported from Afghanistan, Iraq, throughout the Middle East, Europe and Asia.

twitter mailto

AP · by TARA COPP · May 30, 2024

5. U.S., Chinese Defense Chiefs Confirm Plan to Reopen Hotlines in First Face-to-Face Meeting

Is this something we want more than the PLA?

What will make them answer the phone? especially in a crisis. Especially in a crisis that they cause?

I am all for jaw jaw rather than war war and I support the hotline. I just think we need to have realistic expectations given the nature of China and its military and political leadership.

U.S., Chinese Defense Chiefs Confirm Plan to Reopen Hotlines in First Face-to-Face Meeting

Direct channels are intended to help keep tensions in Asia from spiraling into confrontation

https://www.wsj.com/world/asia/u-s-chinese-defense-chiefs-confirm-plan-to-reopen-hotlines-in-first-face-to-face-meeting-2710b678?mod=lead_feature_below_a_pos1

By Feliz Solomon

Follow and Chun Han Wong

May 31, 2024 4:14 am ET

U.S. Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin is in Singapore for the Shangri-La Dialogue, an annual security forum. PHOTO: HOW HWEE YOUNG/SHUTTERSTOCK

SINGAPORE—U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin met China’s new defense minister face-to-face for the first time and reaffirmed plans to reopen direct lines of communication between their militaries, part of an effort by both sides to prevent frictions in Asia from shattering a fragile rapprochement.

Communication was a primary topic of discussion in Austin’s meeting with his Chinese counterpart, Adm. Dong Jun, at the start of a security conference in Singapore, according to a readout of the encounter provided by the Pentagon.

Progress should come over the next months, the Pentagon said, with the resumption of phone conversations between U.S. and Chinese theater commanders. The two sides also plan to convene a crisis-communications working group by the end of the year.

Senior U.S. officials have said direct channels to China’s military can help prevent miscommunication over flashpoints in the region, including Taiwan and the South China Sea, that could lead to a dangerous confrontation.

Communication between the world’s two most powerful militaries had lapsed in recent years, with Beijing saying an emergency hotline gave the U.S. cover to what it views as provocative military operations in China’s backyard.

Adm. Dong Jun is expected to give a speech on ‘China’s global security outlook’ on Sunday. PHOTO: HOW HWEE YOUNG/SHUTTERSTOCK

The U.S. and Chinese militaries resumed working-level talks on ensuring safe encounters between their air and naval forces in April, ending a roughly 2½- year pause, following a summit in California late last year between President Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping that sought to stop a downward spiral in ties.

“This was a positive, practical and constructive dialogue at the strategic level,” said Chinese Defense Ministry spokesman, Senior Col. Wu Qian. He said the roughly 75-minute meeting, which ran slightly longer than expected, “delivered a positive effect in helping the two sides increase mutual understanding and avoid miscalculations.”

Wu said plans to expand two-way contacts between the militaries would include discussions on crisis management and academic exchanges.

Both countries have reasons to pursue calmer relations. The U.S. is preoccupied with the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, while China is struggling with tepid economic growth and corruption in its military ranks.

Still, frictions between Washington and Beijing remain high, with each side particularly concerned over the other’s military maneuvers around Taiwan and in the disputed South China Sea.

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China is expanding its naval bases on the tropical island of Hainan in the South China Sea. Defense analysts say the upgrades point to Beijing’s preparations for a possible conflict over Taiwan. Photo: The Wall Street Journal

Tensions have been especially high in waters surrounding the Philippines, a U.S. defense treaty ally. China claims nearly all of the South China Sea, including islands also claimed by Manila. Chinese vessels have grown increasingly aggressive in disrupting missions to supply a detachment of marines the Philippines keeps stationed on a disputed reef called Second Thomas Shoal.

The U.S. has repeatedly warned that an “armed attack” on Philippine vessels would invoke the two countries’ mutual defense treaty.

Wu, the Chinese Defense Ministry spokesman, on Thursday criticized the U.S. for deploying a new midrange missile system to the Philippines during recent joint exercises, saying it “brought huge risks of war” to the region.

Defense analysts say the weapon system, called Typhon, is capable of reaching targets including Taiwan, Chinese bases in the South China Sea, the Chinese coast and even some military infrastructure deeper inside mainland territory.

The two militaries remained a long way away from being able to communicate effectively in a crisis, some analysts said, noting that China’s top-down decision-making means PLA field commanders have a limited ability to respond in emergencies.

“Saying they are discussing new mechanisms is not the same as agreeing to begin using them,” said Drew Thompson, a fellow at Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy.

Direct communication between the relevant theaters, likely the U.S. Indo-Pacific and China’s Eastern and Southern Theater commands, “may do little to reduce risk in a crisis when de-escalation decisions would be made in Beijing,” he said.

Friday’s meeting on the sidelines of the Shangri-La Dialogue, an annual security forum organized by the London-based think tank International Institute for Strategic Studies, marked the first substantive in-person talks between the two countries’ defense chiefs since 2022.

Chinese President Xi Jinping with U.S. President Joe Biden on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in November. PHOTO: KEVIN LAMARQUE/REUTERS

China rebuffed an invitation from the U.S. to hold bilateral talks at last year’s Shangri-La Dialogue, though Austin exchanged brief greetings with the then-Chinese defense minister, Li Shangfu. Li was removed from his post without explanation in October after seven months on the job, before Dong succeeded him as defense minister in December.

Dong is expected to give a speech on “China’s global security outlook” at the Shangri-La Dialogue on Sunday.

A former top commander of China’s navy, Dong spoke with Austin by videoconference in April this year, after Biden and Xi agreed in November to resume high-level military dialogue.

China’s defense minister largely handles military diplomacy and doesn’t hold command responsibilities over combat operations. Even so, Li Shangfu’s stint in the post complicated efforts to arrange high-level military exchanges, as he had been subjected to U.S. sanctions over his earlier role overseeing arms purchases from Russia. His removal, analysts say, likely cleared an obstacle to a meeting with the U.S. defense chief.

Write to Feliz Solomon at feliz.solomon@wsj.com and Chun Han Wong at chunhan.wong@wsj.com

6. Trump is trending on Chinese social media, and many are rejoicing

I do not want to tread into partisan politics after yesterday's event.

But I do think we have to examine what China may do with this and even though out of the box, how we might exploit what happened against China (or help China make its own mistakes).

And we also have to protect ourselves against the ways China may try to exploit this in the US to further contribute to the partisan divide. I think we can be sure that Chinese bots (and Russian, Iranian, and even north Korean) on US social media will be exploiting this but they will not be doing it in the open like they are doing on Chinese social media.

We should remember that those who would use violence in response to the verdict and the political situation will be doing exactly what the Chinese communist leadership wants them to do.

Excerpts:

On Weibo, China’s X-like platform, the verdict became the top trending topic, racking up more than 120 million views by the afternoon.

“Trump’s supporters, hurry up and mobilize, storm the Capitol,” said a top comment under a news brief by state news agency Xinhua.

Another said: “Comrade Nation Builder Trump should not be fighting alone.”

...

Some nationalist influencers gleefully mocked the verdict. “It seems that in 2024, a civil war in America is not just a dream!” said one such blogger with 4 million followers.

...

“Although he is guilty, he can still run for president. A ‘criminal’ can become president – this is the ridiculous aspect of Western-style democracy,” said another.

Trump is trending on Chinese social media, and many are rejoicing | CNN

CNN · by Nectar Gan · May 31, 2024

Former US President Donald Trump leaves the courthouse after a jury found him guilty of all 34 felony counts in his criminal trial in New York on 30 May 2024.

Justin Lane/Pool/Reuters

Editor’s Note: Sign up for CNN’s Meanwhile in China newsletter which explores what you need to know about the country’s rise and how it impacts the world.

CNN —

As Donald Trump became the first former US president to be convicted of a felony on Thursday, the historic verdict sparked huge interest – and a fair amount of schadenfreude – in China.

As a rising authoritarian superpower, China has long sought to project its political system as superior to American democracy.

But while Trump’s trial has been a boon for that narrative, it’s also offered a potential window into something unimaginable and dangerous to the ruling Chinese Communist Party — an elected leader held accountable by independent courts and prosecutors, convicted by a jury of his peers.

For months, Chinese propagandists have attempted to use Trump’s indictments to strengthen Beijing’s narrative of a United States in decline, citing the months-long legal battle as a prime example of the polarization and dysfunction of American politics.

And as China woke up Friday to the news of Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, the country’s heavily censored social media lit up.

On Weibo, China’s X-like platform, the verdict became the top trending topic, racking up more than 120 million views by the afternoon.

“Trump’s supporters, hurry up and mobilize, storm the Capitol,” said a top comment under a news brief by state news agency Xinhua.

Another said: “Comrade Nation Builder Trump should not be fighting alone.”

On the Chinese internet, the former US president earned the nickname of Chuan Jianguo, or “Trump, the (Chinese) nation builder” during his time in office – a quip to suggest his isolationist foreign policy and divisive domestic agenda were actually helping Beijing to overtake Washington on the global stage.

Some nationalist influencers gleefully mocked the verdict. “It seems that in 2024, a civil war in America is not just a dream!” said one such blogger with 4 million followers.

Under leader Xi Jinping, China’s most assertive leader in decades, the country’s social media platforms have become increasingly dominated by anti-American, nationalistic voices.

“Although he is guilty, he can still run for president. A ‘criminal’ can become president – this is the ridiculous aspect of Western-style democracy,” said another.

Hu Xijin, former editor-in-chief of state-run nationalist tabloid Global Times, also weighed in.

“Naturally, Chinese people are watching the spectacle with amusement,” he said on Weibo. “Here’s what everyone is most concerned about: First, will Trump actually go to jail? Second, can he still run for president?”

But analysts say Trump’s conviction could be a tricky topic for Chinese state propagandists to navigate.

“On the one hand, it highlights a rotting and fracturing American democracy. On the other hand, it highlights that a former top leader can be arrested, put on trial, judged by jury of peers and convicted, for relatively small acts of corruption,” wrote Bill Bishop, a China watcher and author of the Sinocism newsletter.

China’s judicial system remains tightly beholden to the ruling Communist Party, according to legal observers, and has a conviction rate of around 99%.

The timing of the conviction also added to the sensitivity, coming just days before the 35th anniversary of Beijing’s bloody crackdown of the pro-democracy Tiananmen movement in 1989, according to Bishop.

So far, Chinese state media outlets have yet to publish the kind of blistering commentaries that previously appeared alongside news coverage of Trump’s legal entanglements.

Alfred Wu, an associate professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, said China’s state media is unlikely to play up the coverage in the days ahead.

“They don’t want to attack Donald Trump because if he becomes the president, they know the consequences. Instead, they’re likely to use it to showcase the problems of the US system,” said Wu, a former reporter in China.

“They need to be really careful about that.”

CNN · by Nectar Gan · May 31, 2024

7. Taking the Fight to Russia: The West Weighs Ukraine’s Use of Its Weapons

Taking the Fight to Russia: The West Weighs Ukraine’s Use of Its Weapons - The New York Times

nytimes.com · by Lara Jakes · May 30, 2024

Taking the Fight to Russia: The West Weighs Ukraine’s Use of Its Weapons

More NATO allies are backing Kyiv’s pleas to allow its forces to conduct strikes in Russian territory with Western weapons.

Ukrainian soldiers using an American-made multiple launch rocket system, or MLRS. Ukraine wants permission to use these and other longer range missiles to attack military targets in Russia. Credit…Daniel Berehulak/The New York Times

By Lara Jakes

Lara Jakes writes about weapons and military aid for Ukraine.

May 30, 2024Updated 2:55 p.m. ET

With Ukraine’s second-largest city bracing for a new Russian offensive, a growing number of NATO allies are backing Kyiv’s pleas to allow its forces to conduct strikes in Russian territory with Western weapons. This week Canada became the latest of at least 12 countries to declare that arms it has given to Ukraine could be used to hit military targets over Russia’s border.

But the most important supplier of weaponry to Ukraine, the United States, remains reluctant to take the step, worried about provoking Russia into an escalation that could drag in NATO and set off a wider war. Without sign-off from Washington, the American-made long-range Army Tactical Missile Systems, or ATACMS, can only strike Russian targets inside Ukraine.

Yet many Western leaders and military analysts say that with Russia massing thousands of troops on its side of the border — less than 20 miles from the northeastern city of Kharkiv — Ukraine badly needs the authority to strike inside Russia with Western weapons.

“Russian commanders are well aware of Ukraine’s inability to strike back,” said Peter Dickinson, a Ukraine analyst at the Atlantic Council in Washington.

Emergency responders at a building hit by Russia in Ukraine’s northeastern city of Kharkiv, which is only 20 miles from the Russian border.Credit…Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York Times

Officials and experts say that launching long-range missiles into Russia, striking its troops, bases, air fields and supply lines, could pay immediate dividends. Indeed, the Ukrainian military already appears to be preparing to launch some initial strikes, “to test out the Russian response,” Rafael Loss, a weapons expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said in an interview on Thursday.

But Ukraine and the NATO allies are reluctant to shoulder the risk of the policy change without U.S. approval, Mr. Loss said. “The United States ultimately would carry a lot of the burden of responding if there was a significant escalation by Russia, for example, against NATO territory.”

Following is a rundown of those countries that have given their permission for Ukraine to use their weapons in Russian territory and those that have not, and the likely impact if Ukraine is granted the freedom to take the fight to Russia.

Those backing strikes on Russian soil

Every country giving weapons to Ukraine has the right to prescribe how they are used, and so far Britain, Canada, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Sweden and Poland have stated their support for Ukraine hitting military targets on Russian territory.

Some nations are more cautious than others. Germany and Sweden, for example, conditioned their approval solely “within the framework of international law,” as Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany put it on Tuesday. He was spelling out a requirement that other countries have also maintained over the last two years of arming Ukraine, even if not voiced as prominently.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and Chancellor Olaf Sholz of Germany in Berlin in February. Germany recently joined at least a dozen NATO countries in advocating for giving Ukraine the right to use Western weapons to attack inside Russia. Credit…Clemens Bilan/EPA, via Shutterstock

Britain was one of the first to argue for loosening the restraints. “Ukraine has that right,” Foreign Minister David Cameron said during a May 3 visit to Kyiv. “Just as Russia is striking inside Ukraine, you can quite understand why Ukraine feels the need to make sure it’s defending itself.”

The movement picked up steam when vigorous support by President Emmanuel Macron of France helped persuade a more reluctant Germany to reconsider its position this week. “It’s as if we were telling them: ‘We’re giving you arms but you cannot use them to defend yourself’,” Mr. Macron said in Berlin this week, with Mr. Scholz by his side.

Those calling for a ‘prudent’ approach

Several countries — the United States, Belgium and Italy — have said they are not ready to let Ukraine use their weapons to hit targets inside Russia, citing the risks, which can be hard to anticipate. For example, recent Ukrainian attacks with its own drones on Russia’s nuclear early-warning radar systems, a potentially destabilizing step, have raised deep concerns in Washington.

On Monday, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy said NATO allies “must be very prudent” before Western weapons are used in Russian territory. A day later, Prime Minister Alexander De Croo of Belgium announced the donation of 30 F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine — but only “for utilization by the Ukraine Defense Forces on Ukraine territory.”

Mr. Zelensky with Belgium’s prime minister, Alexander De Croo, and its defense minister, Ludivine Dedonder, in front of an F-16, a warplane that could help shore up Ukrainian air defenses by operating in Russian territory. Credit…Piroschka Van De Wouw/Reuters

In Washington, a White House spokesman maintained on Tuesday that the Biden administration would not “encourage or enable” the use of American weapons on Russian soil. But that resistance appeared to soften in the face of mounting pressure from its allies, as Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken suggested the next day that the U.S. might “adapt and adjust” its stance based on battlefield conditions.

The Biden administration has a long history of resisting Ukrainian requests for more powerful weapons, only to give in under pressure and when Ukraine’s prospects seemed to be dimming. This happened with the ATACM long-range missile systems, Abrams tanks and F-16 fighter jets, among other weapons.

But, in a small number of cases, the United States has let Ukrainian troops use Patriot air-defense missiles to shoot down Russian combat aircraft operating in Russian air space, a senior Biden administration official said.

The likely impact

With permission already granted, Ukraine could immediately strike into Russia with long-range Storm Shadow missiles supplied by Britain and SCALP missiles from France. The missiles have a range of about 150 miles and are fired from Ukraine’s aging fleet of Soviet-designed fighter jets.

Several countries — Britain, Germany, Norway and the United States — have given Ukraine ground-based launchers that can fire long-range missiles. Those systems are known as HIMARS and MLRS launchers, and they can also shoot the United States’ ATACMS, missiles that have a range of up to 190 miles.

“If they green-light the use of ATACMS, that could degrade Russia’s ability to use its territory as a sanctuary for ground operations,” Mr. Loss said.

(Germany has so far refused to donate its long-range Taurus missile, with a range of 310 miles, in part out of concern that it would be fired deep into Russia and escalate the war. It is now even less likely to do so, Mr. Loss said.)

Additionally, Britain, Canada and the United States have supplied Ukraine with medium-range missiles or ground-based small diameter bombs that can reach into Russia from between 50 and 90 miles away.

American soldiers using a HIMARS missile system during a military exercise in Indonesia last year.

But the new authorizations may have their greatest impact in the war for air superiority — especially if the allies allow their donated jets and drones to attack within Russia’s air space.

It is not clear if Denmark or the Netherlands would allow the F-16s they are sending Ukraine to fly over Russian territory, where they could be shot down. In comments this week, the Dutch defense minister, Kajsa Ollongren, appeared to place no specific limits on the weapons given by the Netherlands. “Ukrainian attacks on Russian soil are something I have never ruled out,” she said.

At least four other countries — Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia and North Macedonia — have provided Soviet-era fighter jets. Britain and Turkey have sent long-range attack drones that also could directly fly into Russia.

At the least, Mr. Loss said, the soon-to-arrive F-16 fleet will come equipped with long-range missiles that could target Russian jets “from behind their border,” with implications for Ukraine’s future air power.

“We’re not there yet,” he said, noting that Ukrainian pilots have yet to master the warplane with enough skill to counter Russia’s edge. “But there’s some potential for Ukraine’s future F-16 fleet to strike into Russian territory.”

Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington.

, based in Rome, reports on diplomatic and military efforts by the West to support Ukraine in its war with Russia. She has been a journalist for nearly 30 years.

See more on: Russia-Ukraine War, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, President Joe Biden, Giorgia Meloni News, Emmanuel Macron

nytimes.com · by Lara Jakes · May 30, 2024

8. Behind the scenes of the Pentagon’s race to aid in Taiwan’s defense

Congress should ask for a briefing on the campaign plan that is executing this. Surely the resources Congress is providing is in support of a nationally approved campaign plan for eh INDOPACIFIC.

Excerpts:

So as lawmakers quizzed witnesses about how to better support Taiwan, officials repeated their request for funding.

“There is no money,” Ely Ratner, head of Pentagon policy for the Indo-Pacific region, said during the 2023 hearing.

But there is now: In April, Congress passed a $95 billion defense bill, with about $4 billion in potential Taiwan aid. Nearly half of that chunk is for replacing donated stocks.

The challenge now is for the Pentagon to deliver.

Perhaps the "SIG -T" can provide this briefing (though I would hope INDOPACOM actually developed the campaign plan).

However, my criticisms is should we be so laser focused on Taiwan or should we be taking a campaign approach to the entire range of threats posed by China? Should we limit ourselves to a single geographic location? What if that is what China wants? E.g., Keep all the focus on Taiwan and the South China Sea so that China can gain freedom of action everywhere else in the world? Are we guaranteeing our success because will have deterred a war China had no intention of initiating (which no one will be able to prove was China's real intent).

Excerpt:

In late 2022, according to multiple sources who cautioned they couldn’t recall the exact date, Hicks formed a senior integration group for Taiwan, known in the Defense Department as SIG-T.

Its purpose is to focus all the relevant leaders in the Pentagon on a single issue — in this case, support for the island nation. It includes membership from the services, Indo-Pacific Command, acquisition and sustainment offices, policy offices, and other entities in the Defense Department. They meet regularly and report to Hicks.

Behind the scenes of the Pentagon’s race to aid in Taiwan’s defense

Defense News · by Noah Robertson · May 30, 2024

Last fall, during a House Armed Services Committee hearing, the Pentagon came with a message: Help us help Taiwan.

The year before, Congress had for the first time allowed the Defense Department to ship its own stocks to the island nation — up to $1 billion each year. But lawmakers didn’t offer funding to replace those stocks. To some in the Pentagon, it was like being asked to donate to a food bank without a grocery budget.

So as lawmakers quizzed witnesses about how to better support Taiwan, officials repeated their request for funding.

“There is no money,” Ely Ratner, head of Pentagon policy for the Indo-Pacific region, said during the 2023 hearing.

But there is now: In April, Congress passed a $95 billion defense bill, with about $4 billion in potential Taiwan aid. Nearly half of that chunk is for replacing donated stocks.

The challenge now is for the Pentagon to deliver.

This week, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin flew to Singapore for the Shangri-La Dialogue, a security forum that draws leaders from across the region and beyond. His schedule includes a meeting with his counterpart in China, which recently ran large military exercises around Taiwan — a rogue breakaway province in the eyes of leadership in Beijing.

U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin testifies before the Senate Armed Services Committee on April 9, 2024, about the Biden administration's fiscal 2025 budget request for the Pentagon, which includes supplemental funding for Taiwan. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

As Austin travels, the Pentagon’s system used for sending aid to Taiwan is working through another cycle. To accelerate that process, Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks had formed a senior integration group for the Asian nation in 2022. The secretive group, which gathers a cross-section of Pentagon leaders, met last week, according to a congressional aide.

Defense News spoke to sources in Congress, the Pentagon and think tanks, as well as former government officials, to understand the future of U.S. support to Taiwan. Many spoke on the condition of anonymity, either because they weren’t permitted to talk to the press or were discussing sensitive topics. Collectively, they described a moment of urgency for both sides — to harden Taiwan’s defenses and to prove that the Pentagon can quickly act when given the chance.

“The whole idea is for these guys [Taiwan] to … deter, and if deterrence is not an option, to be able to hold their own for a period of time,” a senior American defense official said. “Waiting until after the fact is not necessarily helpful.”

‘We have the authority’

Months before Ratner testified, Austin visited Capitol Hill for a different hearing. Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, asked the secretary about the Pentagon’s new ability to draw down stocks for Taiwan.

“We have the authority,” Austin said. “We’ll need the appropriations as well.”

Around the time Austin spoke, the Defense Department was using that authority to plan its first round of aid. The president signed this package — valued at $345 million — in the spring though it wasn’t announced until the summer, and the administration didn’t identify the weapons included.

This left $655 million worth of its own stocks that the U.S. could still send. For a time, the Pentagon considered providing more and started planning another package, congressional aides and former officials told Defense News.

But it never happened.

“As we started to build some of the options for subsequent drawdown tranches, it just got harder and harder institutionally,” one former defense official said. “There was a lot of friction because the bureaucracy felt they were being spun into a full cycle of work without any money.”

Taiwanese soldiers launch a Javelin anti-tank missile during a live-fire exercise on the island in September 2022. (Sam Yeh/AFP via Getty Images)

Most of this friction came from the services, according to this former official and a second congressional aide. In particular, the Navy and Air Force were concerned that sending more equipment would harm America’s own military readiness in the Pacific.

The U.S. government doesn’t recognize Taiwan as an independent country and won’t officially commit to its defense. Still, they share close ties and work together on a long list of arms Taiwan has ordered from American companies — including $19 billion in foreign military sales.

U.S. President Joe Biden said multiple times early on in office that America would aid Taiwan if the island comes under attack. Indeed, China has prepared for U.S. involvement during military exercises, as Ratner noted in his testimony last fall.

The concerns over readiness aren’t overwrought. Were China to attack Taiwan and the U.S. to join the fight, America would likely be short on many of the weapons that U.S. Indo-Pacific Command says it needs.

Later in the year, according to the first congressional aide and another source familiar with the discussions, Austin froze Taiwan packages amid a lack of replenishment money from Congress. The choice, according to multiple sources, went against the preference of the White House and some in the State Department, who preferred the U.S. send more packages.

‘A million different things’

Because drawing down stocks is the fastest way to arm U.S. partners, the moratorium halted short-term aid to Taiwan. The choice also belied the importance senior Pentagon leaders had given the issue.

In late 2022, according to multiple sources who cautioned they couldn’t recall the exact date, Hicks formed a senior integration group for Taiwan, known in the Defense Department as SIG-T.

Its purpose is to focus all the relevant leaders in the Pentagon on a single issue — in this case, support for the island nation. It includes membership from the services, Indo-Pacific Command, acquisition and sustainment offices, policy offices, and other entities in the Defense Department. They meet regularly and report to Hicks.

U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks briefs media during a news conference at the Pentagon in September 2021. (Staff Sgt. Brittany A. Chase/U.S. Defense Department)

When it was formed, there had only been two other such groups — one for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and another in response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. This was the first time the Pentagon used the model for a partner not at war.

The Defense Department has not publicly spoken about the group. However, Gen. CQ Brown mentioned it in written testimony provided last year during his hearing to become chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

In a statement to Defense News, a spokesman for Hicks didn’t acknowledge SIG-T and declined to discuss how the Pentagon coordinates support to Taiwan, except to say that it follows the government’s decades-long policy toward the island.

The benefits of the group are twofold: It brings the Pentagon’s offices responsible for Taiwan aid to the same table, and it ensures that table includes Hicks, who can overcome the sluggishness of bureaucracy.

But the second congressional aide said the group’s emphasis on material support has involved opportunity costs. Preparing Taiwan to defend itself is an enormous task, one that goes far beyond hardware. It would need to prepare stockpiles of medical equipment and food as well as fortify infrastructure. The aide argued that the group’s focus on drawdowns, which were eventually paused, meant losing time on these related problems.

“At the end of the day, with Taiwan, there’s a million different things that we should be doing at the same time,” the aide said.

Money moves

That criticism is less relevant now, given the $4 billion included in the national security supplemental passed in April.

Of the $1.9 billion funding for replenishment, the top priority is to replace stocks sent last year, multiple sources said. Because new equipment costs more — the markup is about 20% for weapons sent to Ukraine, per the Pentagon — the Defense Department has closer to $1.5 billion than $2 billion to send new kit.

This aid will likely move faster, since the Pentagon already has a set of priorities. Drawdown packages rely on homework done by Indo-Pacific Command, which has sent the Pentagon a list of what Taiwan needs the most.

The top goals in this list, unlike those on order via foreign military sales, are for smaller-end assistance, such as munitions, mines, drones, training and sustainment, according to multiple sources.

Troops prepare to load American-made Harpoon AGM-84 anti-ship missiles in front of an F-16V fighter jet during a drill at Hualien Air Base on Aug. 17, 2022. (Sam Yeh/AFP via Getty Images)

“It’s not really the level of spending that would allow you to purchase a lot of new major platforms,” said Randy Schriver, who led Pentagon policy for the Indo-Pacific region under the Trump administration and now runs the Project 2049 Institute think tank.

The other half, or $2 billion, included in the supplemental is for foreign military financing. This cash assistance helps Taiwan buy military equipment, but does not help speed up the slowly moving $19 billion worth of U.S. arms that Taiwan has already ordered — an invoice that mainly includes large platforms like F-16 fighter jets.

“It’s going to take a very long time for that [financing] to turn into actual capability,” said Zack Cooper, who studies the Indo-Pacific region at the American Enterprise Institute think tank.

Limitations

Last week, after a speech from Taiwan’s incoming president, China launched a bout of military drills around the island, calling them “punishment” exercises.

U.S. officials condemned the drills, which ended over the weekend. But the military activity was a reminder of how fast the situation around Taiwan can escalate as well as the challenges the U.S. government faces in regard to the island.

The first issue is logistical. Taiwan has a smaller military than that of the United States, and that limits how much aid it can absorb. Estimates vary on how much the island can usefully accept per year, but Cooper said the dollar value of this limit could be as low as $500 million.

Another issue is strategic. During the Trump administration, the government took a firmer approach to Taiwan’s defense planning, multiple sources told Defense News. In the past, the military preferred to buy large platforms, such as fighter jets and tanks, and the U.S. used to defer to those orders. But it doesn’t anymore.

Instead, Washington is now urging Taiwan to take an “asymmetric” approach, or one focused almost solely on denying China’s ability to invade. Some in Taiwan chafe at this strategy because it gives them fewer options when China uses tactics that fall short of an actual war — like scrambling fighter jets in the island’s airspace.

The Taiwanese guided-missile destroyer Ma Kong, left, monitors the Chinese guided-missile destroyer Xi'an, right, near the Asian island nation on May 23, 2024. (Taiwan Defense Ministry via AP)

The other challenge is political.

Sino-U.S. relations suffered after then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., visited Taiwan in 2022. China severed military talks, and when Austin attended the Shangri-La Dialogue last year, his sole interaction with the Chinese defense minister was a handshake and brief exchange of words.

Since a summit between Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping last fall, the relationship has improved — or at least plateaued. But it’s still fragile.

Meanwhile, some in Washington have grown increasingly concerned about a short-term conflict with China and are calling for the U.S. to surge defense spending in the Pacific, including aid to partners like Taiwan.

“If you have a democracy that’s so critical to us and many of the other countries in the world that [are] facing an existential crisis in single-digit years, what more would you do?” said retired Rear Adm. Mike Studeman, former chief of the Office of Naval Intelligence.

The balance between hardening these defenses and reassuring China is a delicate one. But it’s not like America’s partner in question doesn’t have practice, said Rupert Hammond-Chambers, head of the US-Taiwan Business Council.

“They’ve been living with this threat for decades,” he said.

Correction: A previous version of this story erroneously described the Pentagon’s Foreign Military Financing program, which is essentially cash assistance.

About Noah Robertson

Noah Robertson is the Pentagon reporter at Defense News. He previously covered national security for the Christian Science Monitor. He holds a bachelor’s degree in English and government from the College of William & Mary in his hometown of Williamsburg, Virginia.

Defense News · by Noah Robertson · May 30, 2024

9. Stress Test: the April Earthquake and Taiwan’s Resilience

Conclusion:

Previous negative experiences with disaster assistance from Beijing to Taipei, coupled with recent interactions after the earthquake, suggest that Beijing will likely exploit any opportunity to assert its sovereignty claim over Taiwan. Despite the earthquake, the PLA maintained its regular operations tempo of gray-zone activity — daily air and sea provocations around Taiwan — on the day and days following the earthquake. While the future of cross-Strait interactions seems likely to be more of the same, it is unclear how Beijing will respond to the new administration of President Lai, who was sworn into office in Taipei on May 20.

Stress Test: the April Earthquake and Taiwan’s Resilience

usip.org

By: Naiyu Kuo; Rosie Levine; Andrew Scobell, Ph.D.

What the swift domestic response, international support and reaction from a neighboring irridentist dictatorship reveal about the island democracy.

Wednesday, May 22, 2024

/ READ TIME: 9 minutes

What did Taiwan's domestic earthquake response look like?

Kuo: The U.S. Geological Survey measured the earthquake at a 7.4 magnitude, while the local earthquake monitoring agency measured it as a 7.2 at a depth of 15.5 kilometers, which is considered shallow and generally tends to be more damaging. A month after the earthquake, more than 1,000 aftershocks were recorded, with the largest one reaching a magnitude of 6.5. The Taiwan Seismological Center predicts aftershocks to persist for three to six months.

Without Taiwan's advanced earthquake prevention and disaster management efforts, casualties could have been significantly higher. A magnitude 7.8 earthquake, for example, that struck Turkey and Syria last February resulted in over 55,000 dead and nearly 130,000 injured; a much smaller earthquake that hit New Zealand in 2011 with a magnitude of 6.7 flattened much of the Christchurch central city.

Located at the junction of two tectonic plates, Taiwan experiences between 700 to over 2,000 perceptible earthquakes on average each year. Additionally, following the catastrophic earthquake of 7.7 magnitude in 1999, known as the 921 earthquake, which resulted in more than 2,400 deaths, Taiwan has significantly improved its earthquake resilience.

Through government-civil society collaboration, measures have been implemented to mitigate potential damage from natural disasters, including enforcing stringent building codes, enhancing disaster management laws and conducting widespread education campaigns and earthquake safety drills. Taiwan's National Fire Agency, crucial in disaster prevention and rescue, highlights the value of previous national-level disaster relief exercises in Hualien for current relief operations. Building on exchanges with the United States in recent years, these exercises have employed unscripted simulations to closely resemble real disaster scenarios.

Taiwan’s earthquake response this time also demonstrates its robust and well-organized disaster relief and management efforts. Following the earthquake, the Ministry of the Interior promptly established the Central Disaster Response Center, with Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ing-wen, and Premier Chen Chien-yen overseeing and directing disaster relief efforts. The Ministry of National Defense mobilized the armed forces to assist in disaster recovery, providing support to local governments. Immediately after this earthquake, local authorities, government units and non-governmental organizations also teamed up to evacuate residents in downtown Hualien. Coordination efforts in disaster relief were especially enhanced after Taiwan experienced the 6.4-magnitude earthquake in 2016 that caused over 100 deaths and another 6.2-magnitude earthquake in 2018 that killed 17 people.

Taipei continues to learn from its experience in disaster prevention and management. One example is the national-level emergency mobile phone alert system that the government would employ to notify the public of a potential Chinese air raid. Although two separate earthquake warnings were issued seconds after the earthquake, residents in Taipei, New Taipei and Kaohsiung reported not receiving the alert. Taipei has pledged to issue the island’s emergency alert on a larger scale, which will play a crucial role in informing and evacuating Taiwanese citizens if China launches an attack against the island.

How did the international community respond, and what does that tell us?

Kuo and Levine: Diplomatic statements and foreign aid mobilized in response to the earthquake provide a snapshot of Taiwan’s standing on the global stage. Taiwan received broad support from the international community, extending beyond countries with formal diplomatic relations with Taipei. A statement from U.S. National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson said, “The United States stands ready to provide any necessary assistance.” Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida stated that Japan is ready to provide any support necessary to Taiwan, “a neighbor across the sea.”

Japan and Taiwan have developed a particularly strong bond in disaster relief efforts, consistently supporting each other during times of crisis by exchanging expertise, resources and personnel. Following the 2011 Tohoku earthquake in Japan, Taiwan's government and citizens collectively donated over $250 million, making Taiwan the foremost donor in the world. This collaboration has fostered closer ties between both sides and has underscored the importance of regional cooperation in addressing natural disasters.

In President William Lai Ching-te’s inaugural speech on May 20, he said that the recovery work after the earthquake is still underway and thanked the international community for concern and support. The spokesperson for Taiwan’s Presidential Office stated that within a day after the earthquake, a total of 88 political figures from allies and like-minded countries — including the Philippines, India, Canada and the European Council — had expressed condolences and support for Taiwan.

In terms of tangible foreign aid, the Japanese government donated $1 million, the South Korean government $500,000, the Czech Republic $150,000 and the Thai government contributed $30,000. Taipei also received multiple private donations from other countries such as the U.S., the U.K., Hong Kong and Australia. Turkey provided technical expertise, based on its experience using of drones in disaster relief.

This response demonstrates the rhetorical power of Taiwan’s capabilities in disaster response. Sandra Oudkirk, the top U.S. diplomat in Taiwan, emphasized the soft power component of the response: “Taiwan has demonstrated a successful model of disaster prevention, disaster management, and humanitarian rescue to communities around the world.” Even as the number of countries that officially recognize Taiwan continues to dwindle, this global response shows that efforts to integrate Taiwan into networks of like-minded democracies has been successful in many ways. At a time of vulnerability, many countries were willing to quickly mobilize resources and come to Taiwan’s aid.

What did China offer, how did Taiwan respond, and what does this tell us about cross-Strait relations?

Scobell and Kuo: On the one hand, China is a logical source of aid and assistance in the event of a natural disaster in Taiwan because it is proximate, has significant humanitarian assistance and disaster relief capabilities, as well as cultural and linguistic affinities. On the other hand, China is far from a disinterested or altruistic bystander. Indeed, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that rules the mainland insists that Taiwan is an inalienable part of China and for seven decades has sought to use all available means to absorb the island. Although since the 1980s, the CCP has dubbed its policy toward the island “peaceful unification,” the use of military force has never been ruled out. In recent years, the CCP has increased its coercive activities in and around Taiwan as well as launched a concerted diplomacy war to squeeze Taiwan’s international space, including preventing Taiwan from gaining recognition from countries and from participating in international organizations.

Moreover, the CCP has seized opportunities presented by past Taiwan disasters to increase its influence, leverage and exercise its sense of ownership over the island. Following the 1999 earthquake, Taiwan rejected help from the CCP and the island’s foreign minister condemned Beijing for exploiting the situation and interfering for political gain. The CCP took advantage of Taipei’s lack of U.N. representation and stood in the way of the global body’s ability to provide aid, causing delays in rescue and relief work. A poll conducted in 1999 indicated that the majority of Taiwanese people (54.9%) did not perceive Beijing’s proffered donation of $100,000 as a gesture of goodwill.

In April 2024, Taipei promptly rejected Beijing’s assistance offer, likely due to a lack of trust in Beijing’s intentions. A few hours after the earthquake, Beijing’s Taiwan Affairs Office (TAO) declared, “Mainland China expresses deep concern and extends sincere condolences to the disaster-stricken Taiwanese compatriots. We pledge to closely monitor the situation and stand ready to offer assistance in disaster relief efforts.” In response, Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council issued a short statement on the same day rejecting Beijing’s offer to help.

The following day, Taipei condemned China as “shameless” after Beijing's deputy ambassador to the United Nations, Geng Shuang, thanked the world for its concern about a strong earthquake on the island. A spokesperson from Taiwan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs condemned Geng for “thanking the international community on behalf of Taiwan,” calling it “political calculation and cognitive warfare on the international stage.”

CCP public rhetoric brings mainland public opinion into play. As noted above, China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) possesses significant disaster relief capabilities. On mainland social media platforms, comments like, “Shouldn't the PLA be sent to the island for disaster relief?” gained significant traction in the days following the earthquake.

When meeting former Taiwan president, Ma Ying-jeou, on April 10, Xi Jinping stated, “I extend my condolences to the victims and express sympathy to the people affected by the disaster.” Then on April 27, a TAO spokesperson said that the CCP was willing to donate prefabricated houses through Red Cross organizations to Taiwan. Beijing announced the offer on the same day as a meeting between a Kuomintang (KMT) legislative delegation and CCP Politburo member Wang Huning, likely as a positive gesture in anticipation of a change of administration in Taipei. In response, Taipei officials stated that unlike the situation after the 921 earthquake, there is no need for prefabricated houses in the disaster area.

Previous negative experiences with disaster assistance from Beijing to Taipei, coupled with recent interactions after the earthquake, suggest that Beijing will likely exploit any opportunity to assert its sovereignty claim over Taiwan. Despite the earthquake, the PLA maintained its regular operations tempo of gray-zone activity — daily air and sea provocations around Taiwan — on the day and days following the earthquake. While the future of cross-Strait interactions seems likely to be more of the same, it is unclear how Beijing will respond to the new administration of President Lai, who was sworn into office in Taipei on May 20.

Rosie Levine is the executive director of the U.S.-China Education Trust.

Naiyu Kuo is a research analyst for the China program at USIP.

PHOTO: A search and rescue team prepares to enter a leaning building following a magnitude-7.4 earthquake in Hualien, Taiwan, on Wednesday, April 3, 2024. (Lam Yik Fei/The New York Times)

The views expressed in this publication are those of the author(s).

PUBLICATION TYPE: Question and Answer

usip.org

10. This ‘Cowboy’ Wants to Teach Princeton Kids About Greatness

Now this is education. I can get behind this. Students want this kind of education. Why aren't there more of these types of classes? (answer to my rhetorical question: probably because there aren't enough professors like Shilo Brooks).

This ‘Cowboy’ Wants to Teach Princeton Kids About Greatness

https://www.thefp.com/p/this-cowboy-at-princeton?utm

‘If the students don’t see the heights, and are told there are no heights, then all that’s possible is mediocrity.’

By Francesca Block

May 29, 2024

Shilo Brooks is on a mission to teach Ivy League students how to read.

If the trend in academic life for the past few decades has been to skim hundreds of pages per day and then pick apart the past, Brooks wants to do something old-school that feels radical: he wants his students to absorb no more than fifty pages a week and see the big picture. And he’s doing it by bucking another trend: he’s embracing great men (and women).

And his message is resonating. When Brooks first debuted his elective course, “The Art of Statesmanship and the Political Life,” in the spring of 2023, just forty kids enrolled. This spring, more than 250 signed up, making it one of the most popular classes that semester, alongside major requirements like Introduction to Computer Science.

Brooks said his course is a deep dive into the autobiographies and speeches from five famous historical figures:

The ancient Greek thinker Xenophon, a student of Socrates who wrote a book about “the life of great ambition.”
Italian Renaissance philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli, author of The Prince, whose last name is now synonymous with selfish opportunism.
President Theodore Roosevelt, the macho man who was taunted as a child for wearing glasses, and “hit people in the face because of it.”
The country’s first female Supreme Court justice, Sandra Day O’Connor, who grew up on a 250-square mile ranch in Arizona and reminds Brooks of his own upbringing: “I see myself, oddly, in her.”
And finally, Frederick Douglass, the former slave who proves that greatness is not just about “how high you get” but “how low you start.”

Brooks said he chose those five characters because each of their stories shows “a grit, a roughness, a rebelliousness, a refusal to conform, an emphasis on individuality that I want these students to see.”

Brooks is teaching texts from Xenophon, Machiavelli, Theodore Roosevelt, Sandra Day O’Connor, and Frederick Douglass in his class, “The Art of Statesmanship and the Political Life.”

“I’m teaching more than just these books,” he added. “I’m teaching a way of making sure your spirit survives the pressures that are put on it and that you remain a unique individual.”

Brooks first developed his ideas about greatness in 2017 when he was a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he pioneered a new ethics curriculum for the school’s engineering department. By putting great books “in conversation with the big questions of technology and science,” he said, he aimed to build the character of his students.

Five years later, one of Princeton’s most famous professors (and its most prominent social conservative), Robert George, hired Brooks to help run his James Madison Program, which he founded in 2000 to teach “American ideals and institutions.” George told me Brooks is a “genuine truth seeker” and an “ideas man,” which is why he encouraged him to come to the school.

Robert George hired Brooks to help run his James Madison Program, which he founded in 2000 to teach “American ideals and institutions.”

When I met Brooks a few weeks ago, he’d just been promoted to the Madison Program’s executive director, and he was moving into a new office in a Gothic-style mansion. Afternoon light poured through stained glass windows, illuminating boxes of books and a framed first-edition cover of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise, inspired by the author’s time at Princeton.

Brooks said he first read the novel in his bedroom back home in Lubbock, Texas, when he was 18, and he was amazed to discover there were places where “young men could read books and engage in disputes about poetry.”

“You got to understand,” he said, fixing me with his blue eyes, “in Lubbock, nobody was doing that.”

“To sit here 20-plus years later, it’s just, I mean, it’s unbelievable,” he said. “It’s like being in a foreign country. It’s the greatest privilege.”

Brooks says he doesn’t know what prompted the popularity of his class, though he has a theory. He humbly admits to a dynamic teaching style—in which he paces the classroom and gives lectures from memory rather than a PowerPoint. It isn’t so much a learned skill, he said, as much as an instinct. “I’d get out there and it was just sort of second nature, like I’d seen preachers do it.”

One of his students, junior Pia Haykel, told me that when Brooks teaches, it’s like he is “walking on air.” She called the class “radical and interesting and cool and exciting.”

Princeton lecturer Shilo Brooks is moving in his new office as executive director of the James Madison Program.

Even so, the popularity of Brooks’s course is surprising given the sense of apathy, or even distaste, many college students feel toward Western civilization. Only 42 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds in the U.S. now say they are “extremely” or “very proud” to be American. (Over a decade ago in 2013, 85 percent of Americans aged 18 to 29 said they were “extremely” or “very” proud to be American.)

At the same time, young protesters on college campuses are literally shouting “death to America,” ripping down American flags, and calling for a world free from “the colonial and imperialist domination” of the U.S. And American institutions are bowing down to this rhetoric. In 2022, a statue of Theodore Roosevelt—one of Brooks’s five figures—was removed from New York’s Museum of Natural History because it “communicates a racial hierarchy that the museum and members of the public have long found disturbing,” according to the museum’s website.

Brooks sees his class as “an antidote” to all that.

“I feel like it’s a little bit shameful in certain intellectual circles, elite circles, to call something past great,” Brooks told me in his slow, Southern drawl. “And I do feel like the students are surprised by me boldly and baldly saying without apology: first of all, these books are great. These authors are wise. And these statesmen are extraordinary human beings. And you can be one, too.”

To watch Brooks talking about his teaching philosophy, click below:

“If we lose sight of the fact that there’s greatness in the world, there’s no one for us to imitate,” he added. “If the students don’t see the heights, and are told there are no heights, then all that’s possible is mediocrity.”

Brooks, 41, has his own story of greatness. He was born in Brownfield, Texas, a town of fewer than 9,000 that, he says, “looks like what it sounds like”—a brown field. He grew up in nearby Lubbock, and his parents divorced when he was two. His mother worked as a medical records staffer at a local hospital until she finally received a nursing degree at 40. A cast of three different stepfathers also cycled through his life; Brooks says he credits one of them, a Navy veteran with a high school degree, as making him “a lot of the man I am today.”

His biological father, Brooks said, was a “hard-charging, hard-loving, charismatic guy,” but he was also a “big-time alcoholic,” and the two rarely saw eye to eye. He died of lung and liver cancer at 51, when Brooks was 21. “We didn’t have a lot of money,” Brooks admits of his childhood. And his mom “was kind of alienated from the rest of the family.”

Even so, Brooks discovered his love for books early on. He remembers, around the age of 12, thumbing through the brown leather-bound copies of Louis L’Amour’s classic Western novels that he found lying around his home. In high school, an English teacher introduced him to classics like Plato’s Republic and Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Another high school teacher acquainted him with novels by F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck, and Ralph Ellison, helping him realize for the first time that there are “minds bigger than my own.”

“I just started to see what books could do and how they could transport you,” he added.

A senior-year English teacher encouraged him to enroll at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, which confers just one degree: a Bachelor of Arts, based on four years of reading and talking about classic books dating back to Homer’s Iliad in 750 BCE.

A senior-year English teacher encouraged Brooks to enroll at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, which confers just one degree: a Bachelor of Arts for reading classic books. An ex-girlfriend’s father paid the bill.

Brooks applied and got in but even though he got financial aid, he couldn’t afford the tuition. Something about that fact made him want to give it all up. He remembers calling up an old girlfriend and telling her, “I’m not going to college.” Two days later, his phone rang. On the other end of the line was his friend’s father, a local hematologist named Dr. Donald Quick.

“This is not what life has for you,” Quick said to him. Then he offered to pay for all of Brooks’s tuition.

Quick, who has five children, told me he saw something special in Brooks, even when he was a young teenager dating his daughter.

“Here’s a guy that’s so intelligent but so amazingly humble,” he said. “I saw something much greater for him.”

At first Brooks’s mom refused to let him accept the offer, telling her son they were not the type of family to accept “handouts.” But Quick, “being the magnanimous man that he is,” Brooks said, called his mom and convinced her. “She calls me back,” Brooks said, “in tears of joy, and says you can go.”

Brooks admits to a dynamic teaching style. “I’d get out there and it was just sort of second nature, like I’d seen preachers do it.”

Brooks said he begins his class at Princeton by telling all of his students in the audience that if “the greatest thing, the best thing, the noblest thing about you on your deathbed is that you got into Princeton, you didn’t do it right.”

It shocks them; makes them sit back in their chairs. And that’s exactly what he’s going for.

“I want them to know that to be a unique individual, to be somebody of depth and accomplishment and substance, you have to have something about you which is unpolished,” he said. “I feel like sometimes the focus so much here is on polish.”

George, his mentor at Princeton, calls his course “an invitation to intellectual humility” because Brooks does not turn his five figures into “plastic saints.” Rather, “he’s showing them faults and all,” proving that “great people are nevertheless flawed,” and that “we should not imagine that we’re not made out of the same stuff, the same flesh and blood.”

When Brooks teaches now, he thinks back to the lessons from Roosevelt, who, after losing his mother and his wife on the same day, dedicated himself to “the strenuous life.” Brooks describes it as “the life of subjecting yourself to difficulties because they make you better. The life of testing your limits, of fully embracing everything about life, of taking on burdens because it’s pleasurable and fulfilling, and to lift the heaviest thing you can to see what you are made of.”

Brooks, who has a six-year-old daughter with his wife, Siobhan, admits he is an example of this. Even now, he feels like an outsider, disbelieving that anyone at an elite college would hire “somebody off the farm.” But he is also starting to see that his upbringing has given him an edge.

Outside the Mamdouha S. Bobst Center on Princeton University campus.

In his junior year at St. John’s, he discovered Don Quixote, the story about a knight who stood out “at a time when knights were long since gone.” It also made Brooks think of something else—his Texan cowboy roots, and his own place in the storytelling tradition.

“I am trying to transmit the spirit of St. John’s to the students,” Brooks said. “When that spirit is transmitted through my mind and my body, it gets this peculiar frontier grit. It’s this mixture of the great books, the Oxford dons, with the cowboy spirit of the frontier.”

Francesca Block is a reporter for The Free Press. Read her profile MLK’s Former Speechwriter: ‘We Are Trying to Save the Soul of America’ and follow her on Twitter (now X) @FrancescaABlock.

11. US Intel says North Korean missile debris identified in Russian attack on Kharkiv: report

Thanks to Fox News for reporting this. There has not been enough reporting on this. Also thank the General Keane for highlighting the collaboration (or collusion) among China, Russia, Iran AND north Korea.

US Intel says North Korean missile debris identified in Russian attack on Kharkiv: report

foxnews.com · by Peter Aitken , Liz Friden Fox News

Video

Jack Keane warns Russia, China, Iran and North Korea are all 'collaborating'

Fox News senior strategic analyst Gen. Jack Keane (Ret.) discusses China's support for Russia.

Analysis of Russian ballistic missiles has confirmed North Korean-produced debris throughout Ukraine, according to an unclassified report released by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).

The DIA has used open-source imagery to confirm debris found after the Jan. 2 attack on Kharkiv, the second-biggest city in Ukraine and the biggest city near the border with Russia, derived from a DPRK short-range missile.

The report demonstrates how the relationship between North Korea and Russia continues to evolve and strengthen as it seeks to improve public understanding of this vital national security issue. Russia has fired as many as 50 North Korean-made short range ballistic missiles, but as many as half of the missiles lost their programmed trajectories and exploded in the air, according to Reuters.

Russia and North Korea continue to deny any arms deal has occurred, as it would violate an arms embargo on North Korea.

NORTH KOREAN ROCKET CARRYING MILITARY SATELLITE EXPLODES AFTER LAUNCH, CRASHES INTO SEA

President Vladimir Putin shakes hands with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during their meeting in Russia on Sept. 13, 2023. (Mikhail Metzel/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)

The DIA report used photos that indicate the missile debris in Ukraine has the same forward motor section and aft motor sections as those shown in images by the North Korean press agency of its leader Kim Jong Un touring a missile factory and reviewing recently-completed missiles.

The analysis also compared the cable tray – used to run wires from the front of the missile to the tail section – and the handling ring connectors, which are used to lift and move the missile.

RARE DISPUTE REVEALS CHINA AND NORTH KOREA'S ONGOING DISCORD OVER NUCLEAR WEAPONS

The forward motor section from a North Korean system, left, matches the physical characteristics shown in two images of missile debris on the right. (Defense Intelligence Agency)

The report’s publication coincides with another North Korean missile salvo demonstration, which fired at least 10 short-range ballistic missiles off the country’s east coast on Thursday, according South Korea’s military. The missiles appeared to land outside Japan’s exclusive economic zone.

(Defense Intelligence Agency)

South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said all missiles fired in the recent salvo appeared to be the same type and were likely destined for export to Russia.

NORTH KOREA FLIES BALLOONS CARRYING GARBAGE OVER SOUTH KOREA FOLLOWING FAILED SATELLITE LAUNCH

The cable tray and handling ring connectors’ proportions from the North Korean state media image, left, are identical to the cable tray and handling ring connectors shown in the missile debris from the Jan. 2 Kharkiv attack on the right. (Defense Intelligence Agency)

North Korea started negotiating with Russia to sell millions of rounds of shells and rockets to Russia in September 2022, as supplies started to dwindle and Russian President Vladimir Putin realized the conflict would go on for far longer than he had planned or hoped. The first shipments of North Korean weapons reportedly arrived in November 2022, with the mercenary Wagner forces taking the supplies.

From there, North Korean support for Russia extended into the United Nations, recognizing Moscow’s illegal annexation of Ukrainian territory in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, which Russia had used as a pretense to invade the rest of Ukraine.

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North Korea allegedly provided ammunition to Russia in late summer of 2023, and by the end of the year Russia started using North Korean ballistic missiles, attacking targets where dozens of civilians have been killed or wounded, according to Kyodo News.

In return, Russia in March this year vetoed the renewal of a U.N. committee panel that investigates North Korean violations of Security Council resolutions.

Peter Aitken is a Fox News Digital reporter with a focus on national and global news.

foxnews.com · by Peter Aitken , Liz Friden Fox News

12. Why Trying to 'Defeat' the Chinese Communist Party Could Backfire

I have long been a proponent of focusing on the CCP. But as one of my China mentors has helped me to understand that even if there was no CCP that China would be acting in the same way. Its behavior is Chinese and not simply Communist Chinese.

Conclusion:

The United States should let go of the dream of defeating and transforming China, a pursuit that would create more problems than solutions. Instead, it should accept the reality that China is and will remain a powerful competitor over the long term and focus on maintaining and, in some areas, regaining a comfortable lead over it. That task – preventing China from becoming the next hegemon – is hard enough, and the United States runs the risk of falling behind if it does not do more and act swiftly.

Why Trying to 'Defeat' the Chinese Communist Party Could Backfire

Aiming to defeat the Chinese Communist Party, such a strategy could backfire, strengthening the CCP and increasing conflict risks. The preferred strategy is maintaining U.S. dominance through enhanced focus on the Indo-Pacific, innovation, and alliances, while remaining open to engagement with China.

by David Santoro Brad Glosserman

The National Interest · by David Santoro · May 29, 2024

Summary and Key Points: The U.S. faces strategic challenges with China, which aims to reshape the international order. The Biden administration's approach involves managing competition rather than seeking outright victory or confrontation. While some advocate for a more aggressive stance, aiming to defeat the Chinese Communist Party, such a strategy could backfire, strengthening the CCP and increasing conflict risks. The preferred strategy is maintaining U.S. dominance through enhanced focus on the Indo-Pacific, innovation, and alliances, while remaining open to engagement with China.

China dominates the US strategic calculus. It is “the pacing challenge” for the US government and is, warns the Biden administration’s National Security Strategy, “the only competitor with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do it.” The emergence of competition as the defining feature of the US-China relationship, which dates back to the Trump administration, reflects the failure of the longstanding belief that engagement would facilitate China’s transformation and convergence with Western ideals, notably on democratic governance, a market-led economy, and the existing international order.

The Biden administration, like its predecessor, has not discussed the goal of competition. It has not made clear, in other words, what competition with China is meant to accomplish. Most recently, the administration has said that it is a condition to be addressed rather than a problem to be solved. In that spirit, US officials have talked about the need to “manage competition.” For instance, Kurt Campbell and Jake Sullivan, respectively Deputy Secretary of State and National Security Advisor, have explained that this approach is about the United States seeking “to achieve not a definitive end state akin to the Cold War’s ultimate conclusion but a steady state of clear-eyed coexistence on terms favorable to US interests and values.”

This is the right approach. The United States is best served by pursuing a favorable balance of power with China, i.e., by making every effort to remain dominant over China. So far, however, and despite notable achievements, the administration has not been sufficiently aggressive in that pursuit. More action is urgently needed to ensure that the United States stays ahead of China.

The problem with alternative approaches

Not everyone agrees that Washington is on the right track. In a recent Foreign Affairs article, Matt Pottinger and Mike Gallagher, two of the leading architects of the US policy toward China initiated in the mid-2010s, argue that “The United States shouldn’t manage the competition with China; it should win it.” They explain that as was the case with the Soviet Union yesterday, seeking a balance of power with China today is doomed to fail and that the United States should emulate the Reagan approach and “weaken the sources of [Chinese Communist Party] imperialism and hold out for a Chinese leader who behaves less like an unrelenting foe.”

For Pottinger and Gallagher, then, the United States should shoot for a clear end state with China, one that would entail the defeat of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and thus a fundamental transformation of the country.

Is that a wise approach? The short answer is no.

Leaving aside the immense challenge – and likely impracticality – of defeating the CCP, that approach could well have the opposite effect. It could strengthen the CCP’s hold on power, as party leaders would urge the Chinese people to unite against US imperialism. That approach would also considerably heighten the risks of conflict. Plus, even if it paid off, there is no guarantee that a defeated CCP would eliminate the challenges that the United States faces today with China, and new challenges would likely emerge. Significantly, a school of academic research suggests that a democratic China could pose more problems to the United States.

There are two additional issues. First, while Democrats and Republicans agree on the need to compete against China, a shift to a policy of defeating the CCP would be controversial and could shatter the current consensus, costing more to Washington than it hopes to gain. Second, such an approach would also alienate US allies and partners, especially given that many already worry about the intensification of US-China competition. If US officials were to adopt the defeat of the CCP as its stated goal, several allies and partners would likely distance themselves from Washington, reversing years of difficult work which has led to security rapprochement with the United States.

What are the alternatives? Two extreme options can be quickly ruled out: the passive expectation of change, and war. The first entails acceptance of China as it is, animated by the belief that its gradual integration into the international system will dampen its ambitions; blunt its aggressive, expansionist tendencies; and facilitate its convergence with Western values, norms, principles, and practices. That belief drove US policy toward China from the 1970s to the mid-2010s and, as most observers now note, failed to produce the expected results. There is no reason to believe, therefore, that a return of that policy would prove successful today.

Similarly, opting for military conflict – war – with China to forcibly change its regime would be a monumental mistake. There is no appetite for, nor even any consideration of, such an approach among US allies and partners, or in the United States itself, even by those most viscerally opposed to, and critical of, the CCP. Understandably so, as a war between the world’s two leading economies would destabilize the Indo-Pacific and reverberate throughout the globe with disastrous consequences at all levels. Worse, a US-China war could lead to nuclear conflagration, especially given Beijing’s increasingly sophisticated arsenal.

Could the United States and China instead negotiate a condominium, an agreement to share power? The call for “a new model of major country relations” put forward by Beijing when Xi Jinping first came to power is suggestive of this sort of arrangement. The United States rightly rejected it, however, recognizing it as both an attempt to usurp the agency of its allies and partners as well as sew suspicion among them about US respect for their sovereignty and interests.

What’s more, there is no indication that Beijing is prepared to share power with Washington. On the contrary: official Chinese statements and documents have long made clear that China wants to rewrite and dominate the international order. In a speech to the CCP Central Committee on January 5, 2013, for instance, Xi Jinping said:

"We must concentrate our efforts on bettering our own affairs, continually broadening our comprehensive national power, improving the lives of our people, building a socialism that is superior to capitalism, and laying the foundation for a future where we will win the initiative and have the dominant position."

Stay the course, but do much more and go faster

In these circumstances, the best approach to China is the one articulated by both the Trump and Biden administrations, which focuses on establishing a balance of power favorable to the United States. That approach recognizes that ignoring the China challenge is as dangerous and impractical as trying to eliminate it (forcibly or not), and it is clear-eyed about the pitfalls and likely unfeasibility of negotiating a condominium. It accepts that, for now, pursuing a specific endgame with China is pointless and problematic, and that more important is to keep the United States in and ahead of the game, i.e., in a competitive and dominant position vis-à-vis its strategic rival.

Doing so requires the United States to adapt its current approach in important ways, however. It begins with giving a clear-cut priority to China and the Indo-Pacific. The United States has responsibilities and obligations around the world, and it should not abandon allies and partners in other theaters, but a more decisive focus on China and the Indo-Pacific is urgently needed, and long overdue. That’s because of China’s size and its ability to project power and influence and the comparative value of benefits accrued if Beijing assumes preeminence in the Indo-Pacific, which is assuming an increasingly central role in the global economy. Simply put, if China is to be checked or contained, that effort must begin and succeed in its own neighborhood.

The US objective is simple: preventing China from becoming a regional hegemon and, most dramatically, deterring Chinese aggression and expansionism, notably Beijing’s subjugation of Taiwan, an increasingly realistic possibility that would have disastrous consequences for the regional and international orders and could forever eclipse US power and influence. This effort entails the use of all tools of national power commensurate to the threat, and thus to a much higher degree than today. It requires the United States to push back hard against China’s increasingly assertive regional policies and posture and, insofar as possible, deny its power build-up, across the board and in all domains. It also requires the United States to considerably expand its presence and operations in the region. A major funding influx into the Pacific Deterrence Initiative is a related must. Only under $10 billion has been set aside in the next defense budget, which is just 1% more than was spent this year and is below the inflation rate. Calling this insufficient would be an understatement.

The United States must do more than seek to deter China and prevent it from becoming the dominant power, however. It should also focus on improving its competitive position vis-à-vis China to ensure that it maintains or regains the initiative, notably in key areas, such as cutting-edge technologies, the bedrock of power and influence in the twenty-first century. In other words, the United States should make every effort to build, or rebuild, its national strength, not just weaken China’s. To do so, the United States needs a whole-of-government, even whole-of-society, approach that yields the creative use of public resources not only to stimulate and support innovation, but also to adopt and disseminate the fruits of that creativity. Significantly, economic policy must be attuned to the needs of labor and capital, to avoid the disparities and inequalities that can shatter the political consensus that is the foundation of effective action.

Close consultation and cooperation with regional allies, notably Japan, Australia, South Korea, and the Philippines, is another essential component because they are key assets – force multipliers – to help address the China challenge. In recent years, a considerable amount of work has been done to strengthen and adapt US regional alliances. More is needed, however, and the United States must also further expand security ties in the region, thickening relations among what have traditionally been “spokes” in its alliance system. The trilateral mechanisms that have either emerged – the US-Japan-Philippines or Australia-UK-US, known as AUKUS – or been strengthened – the US-Japan-South Korea or US-Japan-Australia – in recent years are an important part of this process, and Washington should work with Australia and Japan to find other “third” parties to develop new security triangles. India, Singapore, and Vietnam are three possible candidates, although each, for different reasons, will be wary of appearing too close to the United States in this endeavor. Thinking creatively about ways to further empower the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, which includes Australia, India, Japan, and the United States, should also be on the table.

To build a larger coalition that invests – diplomatically, economically, and militarily – in a global order that can counter Chinese claims that its preferred order is more beneficial, notably to the nations that remain agnostic about the burgeoning US-China competition, the United States must do more on the trade front. Ideally, this would include increased access to the US market, as was promised in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, now the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement on Trans-Pacific Partnership. It has become politically radioactive, however, which is problematic because a key element of China’s attractiveness and the expansion of its international influence is a product of its trade, aid, or investments. The United States is and will thus be hard pressed to match Beijing’s largesse dollar for dollar (even despite Chinese economic difficulties), so it must be able to offer economic benefits to compete effectively with China in this area. Sadly, the trade pillar of the Indo-Pacific Economic Prosperity Framework remains unfulfilled. This gap must be filled. The United States must be seen as a source of prosperity not merely an economic scold. “Just say no to China” is not an international trade strategy.

Critical to all these efforts is communication – to the US public, to the governments and citizens of allies and partners, and to the rest of the world. It is vital that the United States explain the stakes in the competition with China, that success in areas that will determine global leadership and thus the contours of the future world order. In addition to its efforts to better the situation and standing of its friends, China has produced a narrative that argues its preferred vision is superior to that which currently exists. It is explicit about rolling back US power in its efforts to do so. The United States and its partners must counter that claim. It has not yet done so in sufficiently aggressive terms, reasoning that the superiority of our position is self-evident. That is a dangerous mistake.

Finally, it is imperative that in advancing this agenda, the United States remain open to engagement with China, and it should encourage other countries to do the same, offering Beijing the opportunity to play a larger role in regional and global affairs while conditioning that participation on adherence to existing rules, norms, and principles. Some will argue that this is the essence of American arrogance, but it is on the contrary the behavior of a responsible stakeholder within the existing global order. In other words, the United States and its partners must strive to engage China – even if it means dialogue for dialogue’s sake, albeit talking alone cannot come at the expense of action to protect their interests. Even an empty conversation can have value in that it protects against the charge that the United States is unwilling to talk and hence is “the bad guy.”

Back to reality (and realism)

Much of the US foreign policy psyche is anchored in the belief that the United States has a special role to play in the world and that it is able – and should be prepared and willing – to transform others for the better. This isn’t surprising: this mindset, which has its origins in Wilsonian idealism, has enjoyed major successes. After helping defeat Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan during the Second World War, the United States led their transformation into peaceful and prosperous nations and then went on to win the Cold War against the Soviet Union, which turned Russia into a much more benign country, at least for a couple of decades.

To be sure, US strategic blunders in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan are painful indications of the intrinsic problems associated with that approach. They have done little to convince Washington that it should shift gears, however. Deep down, the belief has persisted that the United States should and will eventually beat and transform its rivals, including China.

For all the talk about “accepting and dealing with China as it is,” powerful voices now argue that the United States must win the competition, and that such a victory requires that Washington pushes Beijing to change fundamentally. The irony is that many of the people making that case – such as Pottinger and Gallagher – pushed for ending the longstanding US policy intended to transform China through engagement. Today, they too advocate that the United States transform China – but through confrontation, not engagement. It is the same policy, albeit a different strategy.

The United States should let go of the dream of defeating and transforming China, a pursuit that would create more problems than solutions. Instead, it should accept the reality that China is and will remain a powerful competitor over the long term and focus on maintaining and, in some areas, regaining a comfortable lead over it. That task – preventing China from becoming the next hegemon – is hard enough, and the United States runs the risk of falling behind if it does not do more and act swiftly.

About the Authors

David Santoro is President and CEO of the Honolulu-based Pacific Forum. Follow him on X at @DavidSantoro1.

Brad Glosserman is Deputy Director of and Visiting Professor at the Center for Rule-Making Strategies at Tama University as well as Senior Adviser (nonresident) at Pacific Forum. Follow him on X at @BradGinTokyo.

All images are from the U.S. Military or Creative Commons.

The National Interest · by David Santoro · May 29, 2024

13. IDF unearths more tunnels, gains control of Philadelphi Corridor

I wish analysts would include comments about north Korea's support. I hear from my friends who have contacts in Israel that the IDF has determined that Hamas has had north Korean help in its tunnel development.

IDF unearths more tunnels, gains control of Philadelphi Corridor

BY SETH FRANTZMAN | May 30, 2024 | @sfrantzman

https://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2024/05/idf-unearths-more-tunnels-gains-control-of-philadelphi-corridor.php

Israeli forces operating in southern Gaza. (IDF)

Three weeks after launching an offensive along the border of southern Gaza and Egypt, the Israel Defense Forces achieved “operational control” of the Philadelphi Corridor. This is the name of the border area of southern Gaza that stretches from Israel to the Mediterranean Sea. Part of the area includes Rafah while its eastern and western ends are mostly rural areas. The operational control means the IDF can now spend weeks or months dismantling tunnels and other terrorist infrastructure along the border. Israel’s National Security Advisor Tazhi HaNegbi said on May 29 the war in Gaza could last another seven months.

The border area is 7.5 miles long. It has long been a center of weapons smuggling that has fueled Hamas and other terror groups in Gaza. The IDF last took control of this area in an operation in 2003 when it also dismantled terrorist infrastructure in Rafah and along the border, before leaving Gaza completely in 2005. Since January, when the IDF began to wrap up operations in northern Gaza, Rafah has been in the crosshairs of Israel’s military and political establishment. The IDF chose to concentrate on northern Gaza first in a ground maneuver in late October and November. In December it shifted focus to Khan Younis, the city near Rafah that is the hometown of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar. After a pause in operation in April, the IDF chose May for the Rafah offensive.

IDF spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari called the Philadelphi Corridor the “lifeline” of Hamas on May 29 in a statement to media. The IDF is now seeking to find and uproot tunnels that may be along the border with Egypt. The 162nd division is leading this effort. It is the same unit that led IDF operations throughout northern Gaza from October until April and therefore has extensive experience in dismantling Hamas infrastructure. However, as subsequent operations have shown in places like Jabalya, the initial operations have required the IDF to often return to root out more tunnels and weapons used by the terrorists.

Israeli forces have found dozens of rocket launchers in the area along the Egyptian border. In some cases, Hamas located these systems within 100 feet of the border to make it harder for Israel to respond. 20 tunnels have been found in the area so far. The IDF may be slowly releasing information about the tunnels due to the sensitive nature of the discoveries. Egypt has long denied that tunnels continue to be operational for smuggling between Egypt and Gaza.

One tunnel found by the IDF was a mile long and located near the Rafah border crossing between Egypt and Gaza. This crossing was seized by IDF tanks on May 7 and Egypt closed the border. On May 25 the Egyptians agreed to re-route aid to Gaza via Israel’s Kerem Shalom crossing. Hamas has targeted that border crossing at least four times in May. The tunnel found near the Rafah crossing included “large quantities of weapons, including anti-tank missiles, AK-47s, explosives and grenades,” the IDF said.

The IDF continues to suffer casualties in fighting in Gaza. Three soldiers were killed on May 28 in a booby-trapped building in Rafah and another soldier was killed on May 29. This brings the total losses for the IDF to 294 over seven months of ground maneuver in Gaza and other fronts. Overall, 642 soldiers have been killed since the Hamas attack on October 7, with many of the fallen killed on October 7 itself.

The IDF has wrapped up most of its operations in Jabalya in northern Gaza after several weeks of fighting there. The bodies of hostages were recovered from the area. The IDF continues to control the Netzarim Corridor across central Gaza, using a reserve armored brigade and reserve infantry brigade to conduct sweeps in the area and secure the corridor. This means the IDF now controls two corridors across Gaza. The Netzarim Corridor is where the US-built temporary pier was affixed in mid-May on the Mediterranean side. However, the pier was damaged by waves on May 25 and is being repaired.

Hamas has claimed numerous attacks in the Gaza Strip between May 26 and May 29. These include sniper fire as well as use of 60mm mortars, 107mm rockets and what Hamas refers to as the Yasin 105 anti-tank munition. The shift in Hamas tactics after the initial shock of the IDF advances in various areas reflects a decision by it and other terror groups to move to sniping attacks and the use of booby-traps in buildings. Hamas statements reported by pro-Iranian media illustrate that the group is coordinating and communicating with other terror groups across Gaza, such as Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other groups.

Reporting from Israel, Seth J. Frantzman is an adjunct fellow at FDD and a contributor to FDD’s Long War Journal. He is the acting news editor and senior Middle East correspondent and analyst at The Jerusalem Post.

14. Americans Are Thinking About Immigration All Wrong

We need immigration. The success of America is a result of immigration. The future prosperity of America depends on immigration. The future national security of America depends on immigration. But of course LEGAL immigration through a rational deliberate process is what is necessary for the United States. We need to get this right for our future because we need immigrants. Despite past prejudices and ill treatment of immigrants, America is still a country of immigrants and our immigrants have been key contributors to prosperity and security. And they will be in the future.

Yes caucasians will someday be a minority in America. But so what?

Americans Are Thinking About Immigration All Wrong

Population growth, economic growth, and income growth can be mutually reinforcing.

By Derek Thompson

The Atlantic · by Derek Thompson · May 30, 2024

What’s the United States’ most important problem? For the past three months, Americans have offered the same answer: immigration. More than inflation or political polarization, Americans are vexed by the influx of migrants. Republicans’ concerns spiked after the most recent southern-border crisis. But they’re not alone. In April, the number of independents who said immigration was the country’s biggest problem reached a high in Gallup polling dating back to 2014.

Scolding Americans for their alarm is pointless. The state of U.S. immigration policy is objectively chaotic. When Joe Biden became president, he rolled back some Trump-era restrictions, at the same time that migrants began to take greater advantage of loopholes in asylum law to stay in the country longer. Meanwhile, a sharp rise in crime in parts of Central and South America, combined with the strong U.S. economy, created the conditions for migration to surge. In 2022, illegal crossings hit a record high of 2.2 million. As asylum seekers made their way north, cities struggled to house them. In New York City, so many hotel rooms are taken up by migrants that it has created a historic shortage of tourist lodging.

In a perfect world, the brokenness of America’s immigration system would inspire Congress to swiftly pass new legislation convincing voters that the U.S. controls whom we let in and keep out of the country. The basic contours of this grand bargain have been fairly clear for decades. In exchange for expanded opportunities for legal immigration—more visas, more green cards, and targeted policies to increase immigration in technology and science—liberals would agree to stricter enforcement and control at the border. But major immigration reform is stuck. Changing the law requires Congress, and in the latest example of feckless delay, Donald Trump has instructed congressional Republicans to sandbag negotiations with the White House, to avoid giving the Biden administration an election-year win. What we’re left with is the perception of immigration chaos, anger about the chaos, and dithering in the face of it.

If American politicians are ever going to think about immigration policy through the lens of long-term opportunity planning rather than immediate crisis response, they first need to convince the American people that those long-term opportunities exist. This case is actually easy to make. Cheaper and more plentiful houses, higher average wages, more jobs, more innovation, more scientific breakthroughs in medicine, and more state government revenue without higher taxes—all while sticking it to our geopolitical adversary, China—require more immigration. Across economics, national security, fiscal sustainability, and geopolitical power, immigration is the opposite of America’s worst problem. It holds clear solutions to America’s most pressing issues.

Immigration has for decades, even centuries, created a temporal paradox in American discourse: pride in the country’s history of immigration coming up against fears of its present and future. Benjamin Franklin, whose father was born in England, complained that migration from Central Europe would swarm the young nation’s Anglican culture with undue German influence. In the late 1800s, a more Germanic nation feared the influence of incoming Italians. A century later, a nation that had fully embraced Italian Americans bemoaned the influence of incoming Mexicans.

Ari Berman: The conservative who turned white anxiety into a movement

Although this brisk history of nativism might seem to make light of today’s anti-immigrant sentiment, ignoring the fears that people have about a sudden influx of migrants is counterproductive. The border crisis is not just a news-media illusion, or a platform for empty grandstanding. It really has endangered thousands of migrants and drained city and state resources, causing a liberal backlash even in deep-blue places. Last September, New York City Mayor Eric Adams predicted that the migrant crisis would “destroy New York.” As tens of thousands of migrants moved into Chicago, the city spent hundreds of millions of dollars to provide them with housing and education, building resentment among Black residents. What’s more, papering over anxieties about competition from foreign-born workers is not helpful. The Harvard economist Gordon Hanson asked me to think about the experience of a barber in an American city. If immigrants moving into his area open barber shops, they might reduce his ability to retain customers, raise prices, or make rent. The logic of fear is understandable: More competition within a given industry means less income for its incumbents.

Many Americans—and, really, many residents of every other nation—think about immigration through this lens of scarcity. If the economy includes a fixed number of jobs, then more foreign-born workers means less work left for Americans. If America contains a fixed number of houses, more immigrants means less space for Americans to live.

But the truth is that no nation comprises a fixed amount of work or income. Population growth, economic growth, and income growth can be mutually reinforcing. “At the national level, immigration benefits from a more-is-more principle,” Hanson told me. “More people, and more density of people, leads to good things happening, like more specialization of labor.”

Specialization of labor might sound drab and technical. But it’s a key part of why immigration can help even low-income workers earn more money over time. Last month, the economists Alessandro Caiumi and Giovanni Peri published a new paper concluding that, from 2000 to 2019, immigration had a “positive and significant effect” on wage growth for less educated native workers. The key mechanism, they found, is that, over time, immigrants and natives specialize in different jobs that complement one another. As low-education immigrants cluster in fields such as construction, machine operation, and home-health-aid work, native-born workers upgrade to white-collar jobs with higher pay. To take the example of the American barber, let’s imagine that his son decides to go to a trade school or college to increase his skills in response to intense competition for barbers. He might be better off, making a higher wage than he would have had he remained in the profession. Although such specialization can be difficult for some people who switch out of their parents’ fields, it can lead to a more dynamic economy with higher wages for all.

For the past few years, I have been thinking and writing about an abundance agenda to identify win-win policies for Americans in housing, energy, health care, and beyond. Immigration is an essential ingredient in this agenda. The U.S. must contend with a national housing shortage that has contributed to record-high living costs and bone-dry inventory in some major metros. This is a story not merely about overregulation, zoning laws, and permitting requirements, but also about labor supply. The construction industry is short several hundred thousand jobs. In the largest states—such as California, Texas, and New York—two in five construction workers are foreign-born, according to estimates by the National Association of Home Builders. “The biggest challenge that the construction industry is facing [is] that people don’t want their babies to grow up to be construction workers,” Brian Turmail, the vice president of public affairs at the Associated General Contractors of America, has said. If Americans want more houses, we might very well need more foreign-born workers to build them. Achieving clean-energy abundance requires immigrants too. One in six solar and photovoltaic installers is an immigrant, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and “23 percent of all green job workers are foreign born,” according to a report by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

The debate over low-skill immigration and its effect on the economy can get a bit technical, if you’re an economist, and emotional, if you’re an anxious native worker. But even if Republicans and Democrats can’t agree on the complex macroeconomics of letting less educated migrants enter the U.S. in higher numbers, we cannot let that disagreement hold hostage the obvious benefits of expanding our recruitment of foreign-born talents into the U.S.

Immigration-as-recruitment is a particularly useful framework as the U.S. embraces a new kind of industrial policy to build more chips and clean-energy tech domestically. As The Wall Street Journal’s Greg Ip wrote, America’s new economic strategy has three parts. The first is subsidies to build products in the U.S. that are crucial to our national security and energy independence, such as advanced semiconductor chips and electric vehicles. The second part is tariffs on cheap Chinese imports in these sectors. The third is explicit restrictions on Chinese technology that could be used to surveil or influence U.S. companies and people, such as Trump-era laws against Huawei equipment and the Biden-era law to force the sale of TikTok.

But this newly fashioned stool is missing an essential leg. If the U.S. is going to become more strategically selfish about protecting key industries such as computer-chip manufacturing from foreign competition, we need to revamp our high-skill-immigration policy too. In fact, the new American economic paradigm doesn’t make any sense otherwise. As a rich country, the U.S. will be at a disadvantage in semiconductor manufacturing because of our higher labor costs. If we can't win on costs, we have to win on brains. That means staffing our semiconductor factories with the world’s most talented workers.

Jack Herrera: Is Texas about to turn Latinos into single-issue voters?

Semiconductor manufacturing requires a highly specialized workforce that is distributed around the world and concentrated in Asia. A large share of workers in advanced-chip manufacturing live in India and China. But green-card caps limit their ability to move to the U.S. As a result, we’re at risk of spending tens of billions of dollars on factories and products without a plan to staff them. “The talent shortage is the most critical issue confronting the semiconductor industry today,” Ajit Manocha, the president of the industry association for semiconductor equipment and materials manufacturers, said in 2022. This is a fixable problem. The Economic Innovation Group, a centrist think tank, has proposed a “Chipmaker’s Visa” that would annually authorize an accelerated path to a green card for 10,000 immigrants with specialized skills in semiconductor manufacturing.

What’s true for chipmaking is also true for AI development. According to the Federation of American Scientists, more “top-tier” AI researchers are born in China than in any other country in the world. But two-thirds of these elite researchers work in the U.S. The number could probably be even higher if the U.S. had a smarter, future-looking immigration policy regime. The administration has already taken small steps forward. In October, Biden issued an executive order that asked existing authorities to streamline visa criteria for immigrants with expertise in AI. More could be done with congressional help.

If the U.S. is in the early stages of a new cold war with the authoritarian axis of China, Russia, and Iran, we can’t logically pursue an industrial policy without an equally purposeful immigration policy. Immigration policy is industrial policy, because immigrants have for decades been a linchpin in our technological growth. As Jeremy Neufeld, a fellow at the Institute for Progress, has written, 30 percent of U.S. patents, almost 40 percent of U.S. Nobel Prizes in science, and more than 50 percent of billion-dollar U.S. start-ups belong to immigrants. And yet, we’ve allowed waiting times for green cards to grow, while the number of applicants stuck in immigration backlogs has gotten so large that some talented immigrants have stopped waiting and left the U.S. entirely. This is madness. Failing to solve the immigration-recruitment kludge as we spend hundreds of billions of dollars on technology subsidies is about as strategic as training to run a marathon while subsisting on a diet of donuts. When it comes to high-skill-immigration policy, we are getting in our own way.

Immigration is central to America’s national security, industrial policy, abundance agenda, affordability crisis, and technological dominance. Without a higher number of foreign-born workers, the U.S. will have less of everything that makes us materially prosperous. But none of these advantages should distract immigration proponents from the fact that failure to secure the border is a gift to immigration restrictionists. Border chaos is horrendous branding for the pro-immigration cause.

“Immigration is too important to be chaotic,” Hanson, the economist, told me. “Chaos leads to short-term policy fixes. But you don’t want a 10-month immigration policy for the U.S. You want a 100-year immigration policy.”

Taking that 100-year view leads to perhaps the most powerful case for expanding immigration. The Lancet recently published an analysis of global population trends through the end of the 21st century. By 2064, the worldwide human population will peak, researchers projected, at which point almost every rich country will have been shrinking for decades. Fertility is already below replacement level in almost every rich industrialized country in the world. In Japan and South Korea, there are already fewer working-age adults with every passing year. China’s birth rate has fallen by 50 percent in just the past decade. Within a few years, immigration will be the only dependable lever of population growth for every rich industrialized nation.

The U.S. faces a stark choice. Politicians can squander the fact that the U.S. is the world’s most popular destination for people on the move. They can frame immigration as a persistent threat to U.S. national security, U.S. workers, and the solidity of U.S. culture. Or they can take the century-long view and recognize that America’s national security, the growth of the U.S. labor force, and the project of American greatness all depend on a plan to demonstrate enough control over the border that we can continue to expand immigration without incurring the wrath of restrictionists.

The Atlantic · by Derek Thompson · May 30, 2024

15. Off Leash: Inside the Secret, Global, Far-Right Group Chat

From the left's "JournoList or "J-List" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JournoList) to the right's Off Leash List.

In the spirit of "whataboutism" (or attempting to be far and balanced:-) ) this is from the left's JournoList:

Responding to the Jeremiah Wright controversy surrounding Obama's campaign, one JournoList contributor, Spencer Ackerman of The Washington Independent, stated "If the right forces us all to either defend Wright or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose the game they've put upon us. Instead, take one of them – Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares – and call them racists".^[7]^[8] Chris Hayes of The Nation was requesting ideas from other journalists for best ways to criticize Sarah Palin in an email thread.^[9]

Ackerman was also quoted as saying, "find a right winger's [sic] and smash it through a plate-glass window. Take a snapshot of the bleeding mess and send it out in a Christmas card to let the right know that it needs to live in a state of constant fear. Obviously, I mean this rhetorically."^[10] According to media scholar Jim A. Kuypers, the hatred of conservatives was strong on the list. Sarah Spitz, an NPR affiliate producer, had written that she would "laugh loudly like a maniac and watch his eyes bug out", if she would witness Rush Limbaugh having a heart attack.^[8]

One lesson is these "lists" will always be exposed.

But this section below is most troubling:

The Future of American Democracy: “It’s Trump or Revolution!”

Off Leash: Inside the Secret, Global, Far-Right Group Chat

Military contractor Erik Prince started a private WhatsApp group for his close associates that includes a menagerie of right-wing government officials, intelligence operatives, arms traffickers, and journalists. We got their messages.

New Republic · by Ken Silverstein · May 30, 2024

In his book In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin, Erik Larson cites a cable sent to the State Department in June 1933 by a U.S. diplomat posted in Germany that provided a far more candid assessment of the Nazi leadership than the one that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration was then conveying to the public. “With few exceptions, the men who are running this Government are of a mentality that you and I cannot understand,” read the cable, which was written five months after Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor. “Some of them are psychopathic cases and would ordinarily be receiving treatment somewhere.”

I’ve thought about that passage from the cable many times over the past several weeks as I’ve been reading excerpts from a private WhatsApp group chat established last December by Erik Prince, the founder of the military contractor Blackwater and younger brother of Betsy DeVos, the secretary of education during President Donald Trump’s administration, who invited around 650 of his contacts in the United States and around the world to join. Prince, who has a long track record of financing conservative candidates and causes and extensive ties to right-wing regimes around the world, named the group—which currently has around 400 members—“Off Leash,” the same name as the new podcast that he’d launched the month before.

Among the group’s hottest topics:

• The “Biden Regime,” which a consensus of Off Leash participants who weighed in view as an ally of Islamic terrorists and other anti-American forces that needs to be crushed along with them and its partners in the deep state, such as former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley, who “deserves to burn in hell,” Lara Logan shared with the group chat.

• The shortcomings of democracy that invariably resulted from extending the franchise to ordinary citizens, who are easily manipulated by Marxists and populists. “The West is at best a beautiful cemetery,” lamented Sven von Storch, whose aristocratic German family fled the country after World War II to Chile, where their son was raised before returning to the land of his ancestors, where he married the granddaughter of the Third Reich’s last de facto head of state, who was convicted at Nuremberg.

• Israel-Palestine, a problem that Michael Yudelson, Prince’s business partner at Unplugged, which markets an allegedly supersecure smartphone, said should be handled by napalming Hamas’s tunnel network. “I would burn all those bastards, and have everything above ground, everything left of Gaza, collapse into this fiery hell pit and burn!” he wrote.

• The Houthi rebels in Yemen, whom Yoav Goldhorn, who was an Israeli intelligence officer until last year and now works for a Tel Aviv–based security contractor headed by former senior national security veterans, thinks should be “dealt with” as soon as possible to ensure they don’t grow from “an inconvenience to a festering mess [that] will eventually require an entire limb to be amputated.”

• And most of all, Iran, which participants agreed, with a few exceptions, also needed to be wiped out. Saghar Erica Kasraie, a former staffer for Republican Representative Trent Franks when he served on the House Armed Services Committee and whom, according to her LinkedIn profile, she advised on Middle East issues, urged that the Islamic Republic’s clerical leaders be targeted by weaponized drones that “take them out like flys .”

Not all of the group’s members are conspiracy theorists in the mold of Logan, the former CBS correspondent. I know many people who are in roughly the same political ballpark as the average Off Leash participant, including some of the chat group’s members, who are razor-sharp, even if I strongly disagree with a lot of their opinions. I don’t know Prince other than having been in the same room with him on a few occasions, but we have mutual acquaintances who say he’s not a one-dimensional evil mercenary as typically portrayed but brilliant and funny, and over drinks greatly prefers to discuss business and history rather than expound upon the latest developments in right-wing political circles.

Frank Gallagher, a former Marine who once provided security for Henry Kissinger and who worked in a high-level position at Blackwater in Iraq following the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, isn’t a fan of Prince but offered a similar assessment. “We had issues from time to time, but I can’t deny that he’s extraordinarily smart,” he recounted. “When he came to Iraq, he’d cover 10 topics, and he had command over all of them.”

All of which makes Off Leash arguably more concerning, because the group can’t be dismissed as merely a collection of harmless cranks. Many of the participants, though not all household names, are wealthy and politically wired—which makes their incessant whining in the group chat about being crushed under the bootheel of the deep state particularly grating—and they will collectively become wealthier and more influential if Trump wins the November election. That’s especially true of the Americans in the group, but the same holds for the international figures because the global right will become immensely more powerful and emboldened if the former president returns to the White House. That prospect is a source of great hope to Off Leash participants. “Trump, Orban, Milei, it’s happening,” former Blackwater executive John LaDelfa posted to the group during a trip to Argentina on December 4, two days after Prince created it. “Around the Globe, we are the sensible, the rational, the majority. Don’t give in to fear. We will defeat the Marxists.”

His hopes were shared by many other Off Leash participants, among them Horatiu Potra, a Romanian mercenary who has recently been operating in the mineral-rich, conflict-plagued Democratic Republic of Congo. “The globalists want to control the entire planet [and] the only chance to get rid of them is a spark from a great power (the USA),” Potra wrote. “Surely there will be a strong man like Erik who will initiate it, otherwise there is no chance of regaining our freedom. If this spark is started, all countries will follow suit.… We were waiting for the signal, the spark!!”

A December 2023 United Nations report alleged that Potra owns a company that has provided combat support and fighters to Congolese government troops fighting a vicious rebel insurgency. Prince unsuccessfully sought to negotiate a deal with the DRC government to fly 2,500 mercenaries from Colombia, Argentina, and Mexico into the country to fight alongside Potra’s men, the report said.

About three-quarters of the people Prince invited to the group chat are from the U.S. or live here. The largest overseas blocs are from Israel (32 members), the United Arab Emirates (20 members), and the United Kingdom (20). There are smaller contingents, sometimes a single person, from 33 other countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East.

Collectively, Off Leash provides an informal virtual gathering place for current and former political officials, national security operatives, activists, journalists, soldiers of fortune, weapons brokers, black bag operators, grifters, convicted criminals, and other elements in the U.S. and global far right. The roster of invitees includes:

• Icons of the MAGA ecosphere such as Tucker Carlson, the most revered figure among group chat participants, with the exception of the Supreme Leader himself; Kimberly Guilfoyle, the longtime fiancée of Donald Trump Jr.; and retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, Trump’s convicted-then-pardoned first national security adviser. Flynn has participated, Carlson only minimally, and Guilfoyle not at all.

• Current and former lawmakers and aides, such as Tennessee Congressman Mark Green of the House Freedom Caucus; Vish Burra, who was director of operations for Congressman George Santos; and Stuart Seldowitz, a national security adviser to Barack Obama from 2009 to 2011 who was arrested last November after harassing an Egyptian halal street cart vendor in New York City for two weeks, during which time he called him a “terrorist” and said, “If we killed 4,000 Palestinian kids, it wasn’t enough.”

Prominent figures in the Off Leash crew are well known for their paleoconservative political views, but the private opinions expressed in the group chat are even more extreme and jarring than we normally see voiced publicly. Participants chirpily discussed the desirability of clamping down on democracy to deal with their enemies at home and regime change, bombings, assassinations, and covert action to take care of those abroad. The group’s overall bloodlust periodically proved to be too much for a few more judicious individual members, who in almost any other setting would be considered ultraconservatives but in the context of Off Leash sound like hippie peaceniks‎. One of the dissidents—a National Rifle Association firearms instructor who runs a weapons company—joked that he was worried about an “unsupervised” subgroup of especially enthusiastic military adventurers that formed to discuss topics too “hot” for WhatsApp, saying, “I imagine their ‘to be bombed’ list is over 49 countries and growing.”

Many other Off Leash participants have also stated that they don’t view the group chat as merely a forum to exchange ideas but want it to become a vehicle to put their theories into action. “If we band together … we can damage the other side like no one has ever seen before!” exclaimed Jeff Sloat, who worked with a U.S. Army psyops unit in Central America during the Reagan era.

I don’t want to disclose much about how I learned of the group chat and the nature of its discussions, but I will say that multiple sources in the U.S. and elsewhere shared information, including two journalists who I discovered had learned about Off Leash, which nearly gave me a heart attack for fear I’d lose my scoop. Participants did occasionally express concerns about security, but their worries were mostly centered on the possibility that their conversation was vulnerable to hackers. It apparently never occurred to any of them that their confidentiality might be compromised not by sophisticated cyberwarfare specialists but by old-fashioned leakers, which was virtually inevitable given the group’s size.

Off Leash was still active as of Wednesday, though I expect it won’t be, at least in its current form, for much longer, given that the conversation Wednesday included much discussion about their security being breached, which became evident after I reached out to participants for comment. Fortunately, I obtained details about a large slice of the chat group’s discussions over the past six months. Here’s some of what they discussed.

Solving the Middle East Crisis: Nukes, Napalm, and Other “Extreme Measures”

Off Leash was launched less than two months after Israel commenced its assault on Gaza following Hamas’s deadly October 7 attack on Israel, and that topic has been one of the group chat’s main concerns since it was established by Prince on December 2. Five days later, Omer Laviv, an executive with the Mer Group, a private security company with many former Israeli intelligence officials in its senior ranks, posted a story to the group that ran two days earlier in The Times of London and reported Prince had been seeking to sell the Israel Defense Forces equipment for a plan he’d devised to flood Hamas tunnels with seawater.

“I was involved,” remarked Moti Kahana, the Israeli American businessman who runs GDC, the firm where Off Leash member Stuart Seldowitz previously worked. Kahana pointedly added that at least one part of The Times’ story was false—for example, Prince had offered to donate the equipment, not sell it, he said.

“Why do you expect accuracy from journalists?” retorted Laviv, who during the Trump administration retained 27 U.S. lobbyists and consultants to run a $9.5 million lobbying campaign on behalf of President Joseph Kabila, the corrupt, brutal leader of the Democratic Republic of Congo, who used surveillance equipment supplied by the Mer Group to monitor his regime’s opponents. Among those Laviv involved were Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s former personal lawyer, fixer, and dirt-digger, and Robert Stryk, whose clients have included Saudi Arabia and El Salvador’s state intelligence agency under crypto-fascist President Nayib Bukele.

Yudelson, who also reportedly partnered with Prince in an attempt to buy weapons for resale from Belarus dictator Aleksandr Lukashenko (whom the two men praised for bringing “peace, stability, and prosperity to your country”), predicted the tunnel-flooding proposal would be shot down by the “Israeli left,” a force he labeled the country’s “biggest enemy,” ahead of Hamas and Iran, over concerns about the environmental impact in Gaza. “Who gives a shit about that,” Yudelson posted to the group. “If it was up to me … I would flood them with Napalm! I would burn all those bastards, and have everything above ground, everything left of Gaza, collapse into this fiery hell pit and burn!”

Even that was deemed to be insufficiently hawkish for some Off Leash participants. In a lengthy tirade on February 14, Tzvi Lev, who formerly worked in Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said it was rare to see a people as “twisted” as Palestinians, whose culture “worships death and bloodshed.” The only solution, he wrote, was to “completely uproot the radical Islamic Palestinian nationalism,” which was possible to do based on the historical precedent of Japan, which “went from being nuked twice to one of the world’s strongest economies within two decades.” Dropping nuclear weapons on what’s left of densely populated Gaza, which is roughly the size of Detroit, would be a war crime and kill huge numbers of civilians.

Yoav Goldhorn, the former Israeli intelligence officer, also cited “fucking nukes in Japan” as an appropriate remedy to the Palestinian problem. Sadly, wrote Goldhorn, whose LinkedIn profile says he has “a passion for strategic planning,” there was no one in the Israeli government with “the balls nor vision to go all those extra miles.”

Iran: Off Leash’s Public Enemy No. 1

It was hard to keep track of all the wars, invasions, covert operations, coups, and assassinations Off Leash members favored. One region ripe for a bit of good old-fashioned Western intervention was Africa, which was described as a “pot about to boil over” by Emma Priestley, who posts as “Customer” in the group chat and is the CEO of GoldStone Resources Limited in Jersey, the English Channel island that is one of the world’s most popular offshore secrecy havens. China would have to be taken down a peg as well, particularly as Biden wasn’t going to stop the country “from doing a damn thing,” and indeed he would pave the way for it to do “whatever it is they want to accomplish,” posted Randy Couture, the former UFC heavyweight champion and actor who had the role of arsonist and killer Jason Duclair in the TV series Hawaii Five-0 and starred in the 2011 movie Setup with 50 Cent and Bruce Willis.

But the No. 1 target on Off Leash’s hit list, by orders of magnitude, was Iran. “Follow the source of evil,” wrote Montana Congressman Ryan Zinke, who served as interior secretary under Trump. “Hamas. Hezbollah. Houthis. Iran is the center of gravity.”

“Zinke is right,” agreed Tennessee Congressman Mark Green of the House Freedom Caucus.

Yemen’s Houthi rebels were most immediately in the group’s crosshairs, due to their attempts to halt arms shipments to Israel. Finishing them off would be a cakewalk, but time was of the essence as the Houthis were “relatively limited in strength” at the moment but could become a major problem if swift action wasn’t taken, wrote Yoav Goldhorn, a former Israeli intelligence operative.

To Goldhorn’s way of thinking, the Houthis were best compared to “rot [that] stinks a lot more than the flesh it ate”:

As we’ve seen countless times in the Middle East, if you don’t treat rot it will grow and spread and turn from an inconvenience to a festering mess, and will eventually require an entire limb to be amputated. The Houthi threat has to be dealt with now, while they’re still relatively limited in strength. Otherwise it’ll become a problem too big to handle without extreme measures, or worse yet—remain a problem for future generations to come.

As for moving against Iran itself, the leading cheerleader in the group chat for military action is Kasraie, who worked for Representative Franks of Arizona until 2017, when he resigned amid charges of sexual harassment by two female staffers. “The IRGC is the head of the snake,” Kasraie wrote in one post, referring to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. “It’s time to cut the head of that snake.”

An Iranian American who converted to Christianity after her family moved to the U.S. following the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Kasraie has worked closely with fellow exile Amir Abbas Fakhravar, the co-founder of the Confederation of Iranian Students, which claimed to represent a worldwide pro-Western movement in support of domestic opponents of the Islamic government.

Fakhravar was hailed by the neoconservative think tanks American Enterprise Institute and Foundation for Defense of Democracies—which were leading advocates of the 2003 invasion of Iraq and are currently leading the drumbeat for regime change in Iran—as his country’s 2.0 version of Ahmed Chalabi, the CIA-backed Iraqi exile whom the Bush administration promoted as a beloved figure among citizens of his native land during the run-up to the 2003 invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein. That didn’t pan out as promised when Chalabi 1.0 led a political coalition in parliamentary elections two years after his triumphant return that won less than 1 percent of the total vote.

Now Kasraie, who organizes congressionally hosted “global conferences in Washington for activists to plan the constitutional future of a free, democratic Iran,” according to an online bio, is touting Reza Pahlavi, the shah’s oldest son and crown prince of Iran, as “the only viable opposition leader” and the man the U.S. should install in power after seeing to the formality of dispatching the current government.

“I assure you, the Iranian people want nothing more than to be free from the bloodthirsty mullahs,” Kasraie wrote in the group chat on January 27, and added with equal certainty that younger Iranians were “pro-Israel and pro-America” and that millions in the country felt a deep “sense of nostalgia” for the former royal dynasty. If Reza Pahlavi received strong international support—he would merely be a “mouthpiece” to be handled by a team of “good advisors,” Kasraie stated—the internal opposition “would be much more inclined to rise up and we would see far more defectors.”

For his part, Reza Pahlavi, who hasn’t stepped foot in Iran for 45 years and lives in a lavish estate in the Washington suburbs, said in an interview last year he wasn’t sure he wanted to have an official role in a future government if the current one was overthrown, or even live in the country. This didn’t dampen the ardor of Kasraie, who in one post labeled the mullahs a “cancerous venom that need to be eradicated from … the planet,” with her preferred method to accomplish that being weaponized drones that would “take them out like flys .”

That type of approach was endorsed by others in the group, including Gabriel “Kaz” Kazerooni, a former U.S. intelligence officer, Special Forces veteran, and Blackwater employee in Iraq, who described Iran’s religious leaders as “pedofile [sic] Mullahs” and a “bacteria to humanity” who he hoped would soon “die away.”

“EP [Erik Prince] has the right people in place,” Kazerooni added cryptically, saying it was only a matter of time before the “Mullah Pigs” would be removed from power.

Washington should “take out” the commander of the IRGC’s Quds Force that replaced Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, who was killed in a 2020 operation ordered by President Trump, Lara Logan said. Prince had urged he be targeted for killing four years earlier, when he was informally advising the Trump campaign, in a memo to White House chief strategist Steve Bannon.

Logan proposed the U.S. also assassinate other “key targets” in the Middle East, specifically mentioning “the head of Hamas,” whose name she didn’t mention, but she presumably was talking about Mohammed Deif, who leads the group’s military wing. “That will send a message,” she said.

Nathan Jacobson, a 69-year-old Canadian Israeli businessman who told The New Republic he is a longtime friend of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and fought with the IDF as a young man, had a more ambitious proposal. In order to topple the Islamic regime, he said blithely, “We need to hit” Iran’s nuclear facilities, ports, Qom, where the mullahs reside, IRGC headquarters and bases, and oil industry production facilities, which would shut down the country’s economy for months.

The calls for carnage elicited pushback from two Off Leash members. “The problem is while doing nothing could empower them, bombing might empower them more,” warned Mark Farage, who owns a firearms and ammunition manufacturer in Virginia and made the joke about the “unsupervised” subgroup’s ever-growing list of countries they wanted to be targeted for airstrikes. “I don’t think we have successfully bombed anyone into an ally since WWII.… Maybe we should consider more tools than just a hammer?”

“Huge mistake to attack Iran directly,” concurred Matt Heidt, a Special Forces veteran who deployed to Africa, South America, and Asia, including a 2007 stint in Iraq’s Anbar Province. “We would be inviting 10/7 here.”

Jacobson was infuriated by the criticism of his blueprint for war.

“We don’t want them as an ally,” he said in a comment directed at Farage. “Let them spend their time stoned on qat and screwing their sheep.”

He was even more contemptuous of Heidt’s opinions. “You remind me of the Jews in Germany in the 30’s that thought that by being quiet that the problem would go away,” he sneered. “We have no choice but to hit them hard and then kill these cells if they raise their ugly heads. Why are you taking a coward’s standpoint?”

“So you’re going to waddle your fat ass over there and put some skin in the game or are you content to put others at risk?” retorted Heidt.

“Unlike you, I’ve had skin in that game for years,” said Jacobson, who served in the IDF in the 1970s. “What have you done?”

“Retired SEAL Senior Chief with a Bronze Star with V,” shot back Heidt. Bronze Stars are awarded for heroism in a combat zone, and are not uncommon, but a Bronze Star with V, for Valor, are relatively rare.

Those in Off Leash’s overwhelmingly dominant hard-line faction were having none of the namby-pamby defeatism from Heidt and Farage.

“Bomb the hell out of them,” Kazerooni insisted. “Mess with US and you will eat your Sh_t. We the United States Of America is still the strongest Country in the world.”

More recently, the Off Leash crew has been in a chronic state of agitation over political developments that have led them to further ratchet up their calls for jihad against their worldwide enemies. In mid-April, after Tehran fired missiles into Israel in retaliation for an airstrike in Syria that killed two of its generals in a diplomatic building, Sloat, the psyops specialist, excitedly declared it was “time to disintegrate Iran.” In May, their fury turned to Biden’s brief pause in arms shipments to Israel, though none were surprised by the president’s treachery, as his “Regime is infiltrated by Muslim Brotherhood” (Yudelson) and “compromised … by Iranian regime influencers” (Zinke).

The group finally got good news recently with the helicopter crash that killed Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, though nerves frayed as they awaited confirmation he was dead. If he’d tragically survived, wondered Tzvi Lev, perhaps it would be possible to dispatch a Special Forces search and rescue unit to “disappear” him before he was found.

The Future of American Democracy: “It’s Trump or Revolution!”

Even more worrying to group chat members than the state of global affairs was that democracy was under attack across the world, especially in the West and most of all in the U.S. They blamed the same barbarians at the gate science fiction writer Robert Heinlein pointed to in To Sail Beyond the Sunset, which was published in 1987, the year before his death. “Democracy often works beautifully at first,” but the day the franchise is extended “to every warm body … marks the beginning of the end of that state,” Heinlein wrote. “For when the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses without limit and that the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them, they will do so, until the state bleeds to death, or in its weakened condition … succumbs to an invader—the barbarians enter Rome.” The passage about bread and circuses was posted in its entirety on February 16 by former Virginia Congressman Tom Garrett, who offered it as an explanation for why democratic governance made it impossible to address the problems facing the United States.

“Definitely an issue,” agreed Scott Taylor, another former House member from Virginia, and Republicans were responsible as well. Too many GOP lawmakers campaigned as principled opponents of government spending, Taylor wrote on the list, but were “more concerned about their individual selves then actually advancing conservative policy” and chased federal money for their home districts like common Democrats in hopes of currying favor with their pleb constituents.

Former President Trump’s campaign to return to the White House posed an even graver and more imminent threat to American democracy. It wasn’t Trump, per se, or his efforts to reverse the results of the 2020 presidential election that troubled the group, needless to say. The danger was that following his landslide victory this November, which was a foregone conclusion, the deep state would “steal it again,” just as it had four years ago, Yudelson posted. “I just hope and pray that they will not JFK Trump before the elections, physically, or with some of their other methods.”

Despite such trepidations, Congressman Zinke spoke for the group when he wrote, “There is only one path forward. Elect Trump.”

“It’s Trump or Revolution!” Yudelson chimed in from the chorus.

“You mean Trump AND Revolution,” a right-leaning Canadian businessman shot back. “The Left is too violent to sit back and let Trump win again.”

John Mills, a retired Army colonel who held a cybersecurity post at the Pentagon under Trump, was overcome with emotion when his hero appeared at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February. “Tears streamed down my face,” he wrote to the Off Leash group chat from the event. “DJT and the J6ers are in the house.”

The view that Trump represented a unique hope was shared by group chat members outside of the U.S. “He is the best thing … even in Africa,” offered N.J. Ayuk, a native of Cameroon who currently lives in Johannesburg, where he founded a law firm that assists clients with interests in the oil and gas sector. “Trump all the way ”

“I live in darkest west Africa,” posted Emma Priestley of GoldStone Resources Limited. The overall situation was such an irredeemable mess, Trump himself might not be able to “save this shithole of a continent.”

“Completely agree,” replied Ayuk, who once worked as an intern for the late New Jersey Democratic Congressman Donald Payne but was deported in 2007 after pleading guilty to using his boss’s stationery and signature stamp to illegally obtain visas to the U.S. for citizens of his home country. The Biden administration had been “a disaster” for Africa. “They only give us lectures and talk about renewables,” said Ayuk. “These latte liberators are actually the problem.”

That was a minor offense among the long litany of crimes Off Leash participants laid at Biden’s door. “Looks like the globalists are enabling this mass illegal immigration,” Yudelson, citing an article at Zerohedge, wrote in one post. “Surely with tremendous assistance from the Biden Regime.” But Biden was merely a figurehead controlled by “elements that are actually ruling for the Deep State,” he continued. The real problem was that Democrats had been “in cahoots with the Muslim Brotherhood and infiltrated by their proxies and agents, as well as Ayatollah sympathizers” ever since President Bill Clinton’s administration.

With the Democratic Party captured by Islamic terrorists, Marxists, globalists, and other foreign and domestic evildoers, the U.S. was “being destroyed from within,” warned Kasraie, whose fears were shared by many among the Off Leash crew.

“The insurgency within our country today is going to bite us,” said Scott Freeman, the CEO of a Virginia company called International Preparedness Associates, which designs “unique special programs” that help defend U.S. national security, friendly foreign governments, and private-sector interests, according to its website.

Many Off Leash participants were even less restrained. When a chat group participant posted a story that revealed JPMorgan Chase had hired General Mark Milley—whom Trump appointed chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff but clashed with during and after his presidency—as a senior adviser, Lara Logan went off the rails. “Milley is a piece of shit and a traitor and he deserves to burn in hell,” posted Logan, who holds a seat on the board of America’s Future, a conservative nonprofit chaired by Off Leash member and former Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, Trump’s national security adviser for less than a month.

At a February 23 America’s Future event, Logan shared that she’d originally been skeptical of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, which spread in far-right circles during the 2016 election and proposed that Hillary Clinton and other Democratic Party officials were running a child sex trafficking ring out of the pizzeria Comet Ping Pong. However, after conducting her own independent investigation, Logan told the audience at the event, she’d discovered, “Holy guacamole! This actually is all true.”

What, then, was to be done?

The answer was clear to Freeman, a.k.a. “ScottyF” in the group chat. “Apply all tenets of warfare internally against the many enemies living among us. America is capable of being fully capable again. Do we have the will to levy the toll?”

Jesse Barnett, a retired Navy SEAL specializing in “Active Shooter Prep ... and Crisis Prevention” who ran the Indianapolis-based indoor shooting simulator Poseidon Experience, offered a harsh but necessary recipe. “We need a Nuremberg style clean up of this global cabal,” he proposed. “Only through accountability can we cleanse our spirits.” Once the cleansing was out of the way, security could be maintained by using “technology to identify sociopaths and keep them in their place.”

On the roster of Off Leash participants, there was one—a poster with the handle of “S,” whom it took me weeks to identify—who stood out as a particularly dark character. There were some in the group who expressed more unhinged views and others who more casually called for violence against their enemies; what made S distinctive was his dry, bloodless manner and businesslike espousal of a disciplined worldview that was unmistakably fascist.

“This is no longer politics, this is an open war against freedom and human nature. And wars aren’t won with more balloons and confetti as we know,” S wrote. “It’s no longer a ‘game’ either.… It is time to adapt strategies to reality and stop pretending that we live in a free democracy in the West.”

S was later revealed to be Sven von Storch, born to a German family that left for Chile after World War II, whose wife, Beatrix von Storch, is the granddaughter of Lutz Graf Schwerin von Krosigk, Hitler’s finance minister from 1933, the year he took power, until he killed himself in Berlin in April 1945, as Russian troops closed in on the bunker where he and the dregs of his loyalists were holed up. In his last will and testament, Hitler appointed von Krosigk to serve under Joseph Goebbels, his handpicked successor as chancellor, but since his minister of propaganda committed suicide the day after Hitler, von Krosigk became the Third Reich’s head of state during its final days. “Von Krosigk never wavered in his enthusiasm and labors for the Nazi cause,” prosecutor Alexander Hardy said during his trial at Nuremberg, where he was sentenced to 10 years for financing the concentration camps and other crimes.

Beatrix von Storch is a leader and Bundestag member with Alternative for Germany, arguably the most radical of Europe’s far-right parties, which calls for a crackdown on immigration into the country to protect its “Western Christian culture,” a variant of the “great replacement” theory espoused by white supremacists in the United States. Sven von Storch doesn’t hold elected office, but he’s considered to be a prominent figure in the AfD. An admirer of Steve Bannon, von Storch has close ties to Chile’s pro-Pinochet political bloc; he and his wife met with Jair Bolsonaro, the country’s former president, at the presidential palace in Brazil, and the latter’s powerful son Eduardo gave the couple a bottle of the first family’s brand wine as a gift.

“Law and justice no longer mean anything in the West,” von Storch wrote during the same conversation. “Stupid and naive people may still believe it. And probably not even them anymore.”

It’s not clear how many in the group knew S’s real identity, but he was clearly a pedigreed German fascist who even within the rarefied far-right ecosphere of Off Leash sat at a distinctly extreme end. No one seemed troubled by his views, and indeed von Storch was warmly embraced. “This is getting interesting,” Kazerooni wrote in response to his post. “Love this Group.”

Freeman was one of a number of group chat participants who, like the former psyops specialist Sloat, wanted to look for ways to implement their policy ideas. A group with so much “experience, accomplishments and resources” should look for a few issues we “might be able to influence together,” Freeman proposed. “Not to save the world or the idiots in the USA but rather a core of us or perhaps a broader group of like minds/patriots of some sort. ”

Reading the group chat’s conversations would be comical if it wasn’t so pitiful and disturbing in equal measure. Group members clearly regard themselves as natural elites who are more intelligent, virtuous, and honorable than Heinlein’s tired, poor, unwashed plebs.

Yet none of the four current and former members of Congress who are active in the group distinguished themselves as model public servants. In 2018, Zinke resigned as Trump’s secretary of the interior after an Inspector General’s report concluded he was a serial violator of ethics laws. Green withdrew his nomination to be Trump’s army secretary after being criticized, including by GOP John McCain, for past statements he’d made that called for his fellow citizens to “take a stand on the indoctrination of Islam in public schools” and labeled transgender people “evil.” Garrett resigned his House seat in 2018 after it was alleged he and his wife used his congressional staff to run errands, chauffeur their children, and clean up after their dog, though he denied those charges and cited alcoholism as the reason he had stepped down. Four staffers who worked on Taylor’s 2018 reelection campaign were subsequently indicted for election fraud, which he said he knew nothing about, but he lost that race and did again when he ran for his old seat two years later.

Even more farcical was the manner in which group chat members portrayed themselves as rightful guardians of democracy, even as they proposed employing military force against their unarmed domestic political opponents and rounding up members of the “global cabal” for trial at a Nuremberg-style tribunal. It’s blazingly evident that many in the group can’t even define democracy, and those who can don’t like it.

Dallas real estate developer Scott Hall informed the group he was moving his family to the UAE, which is ruled by an authoritarian monarchy, because “freedom is real” there. When President Gustavo Petro, Colombia’s first leftist president, was running for office two years ago, the rural oligarch Sergio Araujo Castro publicly declared that his employees “have the right to vote freely for whoever they want,” but he’d fire any who supported Petro. After protests against the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s assault on Gaza erupted at Stanford in January, Goldhorn wondered how it was legal that students who took part weren’t summarily expelled as they received benefits from the U.S. government, but “[wished] for its destruction,” which he evidently equated with criticism of its policies.

I sent messages seeking comment to Prince and the 29 participants whose comments in the group chat are cited in this story. Prince did not respond. Of the others, only Barnett, Jacobson, and Goldhorn were willing to be interviewed.

Barnett, who once worked for Blackwater, said participants in the group chat “love the country and want good solutions” and that he was not an ideologue and favored “checks and balances, and transparency.” A “centrist who leans libertarian” and Barack Obama voter in 2008, Barnett said the 9/11 attacks seven years earlier were an “inside job 100 percent,” and that they “woke me up” and triggered the political evolution that led to his current “conspiracy observationist perspective.”

Barnett said he was a Trump fan in part because “the establishment hates” the former president, adding that the Russiagate scandal that led to his first impeachment had been cooked up by Democrats as part of a politically motivated attack to drive him from office. (An opinion I share.) When I told Barnett his remarks about the need for a new Nuremberg tribunal sounded like a call for an attack of the same type but against enemies of the group chat, he said he didn’t favor a politically driven kangaroo court but envisioned a scrupulously fair judicial process that “truly enables our country to move forward,” which could be ensured by establishing panels with impartial experts such as journalist Matt Taibbi, psychologist and commentator Jordan Peterson, and others of similarly “high integrity” to help determine who would be prosecuted.

Jacobson also said his remarks in the group chat sounded harsher than he’d intended. Despite having been friendly with Netanyahu for many years, he said the Israeli prime minister and his government were “long past their expiry date,” and he considered the military attack on Gaza to be “a complete failure.” On Iran, Jacobson said he “loved Iranian culture, cuisine, and people” and noted that he’d spent time with Reza Pahlavi last week when the latter was in Toronto, where he lives.

“I hate the mullah’s regime,” Jacobson added, but “I’m not calling to go to war” but to help the domestic opposition bring the regime down by bombing Iranian oil infrastructure and related targets. About a month ago, he’d proposed that during an informal discussion with an unnamed Israeli official, telling his interlocutor that Iran’s missile strikes against Israel were “our opportunity to hit their oil facilities so they can’t make money to finance terrorism.” About Off Leash itself, Jacobson said, “I enjoy the banter of the group, but it’s not a political conspiracy.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Goldhorn, who told me he knows Prince “very tentatively,” replied when I paraphrased his remarks about dropping nuclear weapons on Gaza and regarding the Houthis. “I didn’t see anyone proposing or discussing such actions in the group, so I can’t really comment on these claims.” When I sent him the relevant excerpts, his memory was refreshed regarding the Houthis, though he said he was “referring to the naval threat mostly,” as the group was seeking to sink merchant ships. “I was not [referring] to the Yemenese [sic] people as a whole, only the military organization.” He continued to insist he’d “never suggested to nuke Gaza, which is a laughably dumb idea,” though I had excerpts of the respective conversations about both topics, which were faithfully recounted earlier, and the quotes from Goldhorn are verbatim.

Off Leash’s participants want a “democracy” where the “plebs” vote the way they want in every election and the government only approves their preferred policies, which would give them the absolute certainty they want that their outsize wealth, privileges, and influence will be protected. That’s not the way democracy works, it’s the way dictatorships do, which no doubt feels comfortable to group chat members who have thrived doing business with corrupt, repressive regimes and leaders, which is the way many met each other and Prince, and how they came to be part of Off Leash in the first place.

To paraphrase the assessment of Nazi officials made by the U.S. diplomat from Erik Larsen’s In the Garden of Beasts, during ordinary times, people who hold such opinions would be receiving treatment somewhere. However, to continue with the analogy, many Off Leash participants currently hold powerful political roles or are intimate allies of those who do.

The key to expanding their influence, in the collective view of the group chat, and not only its American members, is a victory by Trump in the November election. “The freedom of the Western world is decided in the USA,” as von Storch put it. “As long as the USA lets the globalists do whatever they want, we patriots in the rest of the world can only try to maintain and survive our positions.”

Comparing the contemporary United States to Nazi Germany is an admittedly imprecise analogy. Nevertheless, it’s impossible not to be alarmed by the crypto-fascist, off the leash views expressed by Trump’s allies in the group chat about exterminating their foreign and domestic enemies and needing to “find the will to levy the toll.” However imprecise the comparison, as a model political capital, Berlin 1933 is far more compatible with the worldview of Off Leash participants than Washington 2024, and in the event they and like-minded associates gain power in the U.S. or elsewhere, they’ll be pushing backward in that general direction.

New Republic · by Ken Silverstein · May 30, 2024

16. How Myanmar’s civil war is rippling into the U.S. and around the world

The five threats - revolution, resistance, insurgency, terroriism, and civil war. All related and some are interconnected. But it is good to see NBC News describe the conflict in Burma as a civil war which it fundamentally is.

And of course with the huge criminal element as part of the problem it can also be described as a hybrid conflict. Determining the right name for it may be a challenge and there will never be agreement. But the intellectual rigor to analyze the conflict is necessary and will hopefully bring understanding which is the key to developing campaign plans to address the situation.

How Myanmar’s civil war is rippling into the U.S. and around the world

The military government is battling to hold on to power as internal instability alarms neighbors and turns the Southeast Asian country into a global hub for organized crime.

NBC News · by Mithil Aggarwal

More than three years after overthrowing a democratically elected government, the Myanmar military is battling to hold on to power as a protracted civil war in the Southeast Asian country draws in neighbors such as China and India and fuels a rise in cybercrime and drug trafficking that reaches around the world.

Ethnic militias have been fighting the Myanmar junta since February 2021, when the military ousted Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, the country’s leader. But a coordinated offensive by an alliance of armed groups has made stunning advances since last fall, with resistance forces claiming the junta controls less than half of the Texas-sized country.

“This is a people’s revolution,” Kyaw Zaw, a spokesperson for the National Unity Government, Myanmar’s government-in-exile, told NBC News in a phone interview.

“In three years, we have achieved so much success that we switched from defense to offense,” he said, “and are now staging the offensive against the military forces which people thought cannot be defeated.”

The proportion of territory controlled by Myanmar’s military could not be independently verified.

The last few years have taken a huge toll on Myanmar: thousands of people killed, 3 million displaced, entire towns destroyed and the middle class cut in half. “Myanmar stands at the precipice in 2024 with a deepening humanitarian crisis,” the United Nations said in a statement in May.

But the implications of what’s happening in Myanmar are not limited to its 55 million citizens. The war is wreaking indirect havoc on the lives of people in the U.S. and elsewhere, as a country widely referred to as a “failing state” becomes what experts say is a “global hub of organized transnational crime.”

According to the U.N., at least 120,000 people in Myanmar have been forced to work in scam centers that run online fraud operations such as “pig butchering,” in which victims all over the world, including in the U.S., are conned out of huge sums of money by scammers posing as successful investors or potential romantic partners.

The drug trade has also flourished: In December, the U.N. said Myanmar had surpassed Afghanistan as the world’s top producer of opium, the base ingredient in heroin. In addition, an international watchdog has blacklisted Myanmar alongside North Korea and Iran for terrorism financing and money laundering.

“They’re not just laundering their own cash, they’re laundering on behalf of criminal enterprises all over the world,” said Richard Horsey, a senior adviser for Myanmar at the International Crisis Group.

So how did Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, get here?

A decade of progress ‘wiped out’

Myanmar’s military, also known as the Tatmadaw, has been a powerful force in government since the former British colony gained independence in 1948. Over decades of fighting with an array of ethnic rebel groups, the military in Buddhist-majority Myanmar has been accused of persecuting and killing thousands of members of minority groups including the mostly Muslim Rohingya, almost 1 million of whom remain stateless years after fleeing to neighboring Bangladesh.

The U.N. and others say the Rohingya are once again under threat amid escalating conflict between the junta and armed groups in the state of Rakhine, their traditional home, including forced recruitment. “The situation is increasingly dangerous for all civilians, including Rakhine, Rohingya, and other ethnic communities,” the U.S. and other governments said in a statement last week.

The military’s persecution of the Rohingya, which according to the U.N. has included summary executions, mass rape and the burning of villages, tarnished the reputation of Suu Kyi, who defended the military against allegations of genocide at the International Court of Justice in 2019.

Aung San Suu Kyi in Bangkok on Nov. 3, 2019.Manan Vatsyayana / AFP via Getty Images file

Suu Kyi, 78, the daughter of an assassinated independence activist, had become leader of Myanmar after her National League for Democracy won a landslide victory in 2015 in the country’s first democratic election in 25 years.

Though her civilian government had to continue to share power with the military, whose formal rule ended in 2011, it was a hopeful time for Myanmar both politically and economically. Tourists filled the streets of Yangon, Myanmar’s biggest city, and international companies such as Coca-Cola, Unilever and KFC invested heavily in the country.

Gross domestic product grew 6% annually from 2011 to 2019, and poverty levels in 2017 stood at less than half of what they were in 2005, said Kanni Wignaraja, the U.N. Development Programme’s Asia chief.

In November 2020, Suu Kyi and her party easily won re-election. Claiming without evidence that the results were illegitimate, the military deposed her in a coup on Feb. 1, 2021.

Tens of thousands of mostly peaceful protesters turned out to demand a return to elected government. The junta responded with deadly force, leading foreign companies to withdraw and the U.S. and other Western countries to impose sanctions targeting the military.

Myanmar’s coup has “wiped out 10 years of slow but steady progress,” Wignaraja said, noting that the country’s GDP fell 18% in 2021.

Suu Kyi, who has been detained by the military since the coup, faces 27 years in prison for a range of crimes, all of which she denies. Although the junta has promised elections, they have yet to be scheduled.

“But people didn’t just accept that, ‘Oh, we’ll learn to live with it,’” Horsey said. “They decided to fight back.”

Rebel forces uniting

United in their opposition to the junta, Myanmar’s disparate rebel groups have loosely organized themselves into the People’s Defense Force, the armed wing of Myanmar’s shadow government. But until recently, they acted mostly independently and rarely operated outside their home communities.

The tide began to turn last year when three of those armed groups formed an alliance, seizing control of multiple towns and military bases near the border with China. Their astonishing success inspired other resistance groups to launch their own offensives.

As a result, the junta has lost territory “faster than any time in recent history,” Horsey said.

The junta did not respond to NBC News’ request for comment.

The conflict has created instability in areas near the five countries that Myanmar shares borders with: China, India, Bangladesh, Thailand and Laos. For about two weeks in April, rebel forces led by the armed wing of the Karen National Union (KNU) controlled the town of Myawaddy, a critical trading post on the Thai border, leading Thailand to step up security in its border town of Mae Sot as thousands of Myanmar civilians and soldiers tried to cross over.

A Thai soldier stands in front of refugees from Myanmar in Mae Sot, Thailand, on April 12.Kaung Zaw Hein / SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

In the coming months, the junta “will be getting into trouble a lot, politically, militarily, diplomatically, economically,” KNU spokesperson Saw Taw Nee told NBC News via text message.

“Our single objective is removing the coup makers,” he added.

Neighboring countries such as Thailand have also been grappling with an influx of refugees from Myanmar, an exodus Wignaraja said might worsen with the junta’s announcement in May that it would start restricting conscription-age men from leaving the country.

In early May, India began deporting some of the thousands of Myanmar refugees who have fled there since the coup.

Myanmar’s military government “barely controls its international borders,” Horsey said.

China has been especially dissatisfied with Myanmar’s inability to control its border areas, which have become hot spots for crime. In November, Myanmar authorities handed over more than 31,000 telecom fraud suspects to China as part of a crackdown by both countries on online scams.

For now, neither the junta nor the rebel groups seems to be letting up, and Kyaw says the only solution for Myanmar, and the stability of the region, is for it to have a democratic government.

“As long as the military holds power, our country will not be peaceful and that will impact regional stability,” he said.

“This is a time that numerous people have decided enough is enough.”

NBC News · by Mithil Aggarwal

17. US military conducts tunnel warfare exercise in Morocco

Where are the most tunnels that will be part of a military conflict? (two letter hint: nK). Just saying. It is good to know that part of the National Guard 19th Special Forces Group is apportioned to Korea (or at least it used to be). And my real point is that we need to ensure we are passing lessons learned across theater boundaries (which I think we have been doing well in recent years at least based on my conversations with theater special operations commands - I see good sharing of lessons and information).

US military conducts tunnel warfare exercise in Morocco

defence-blog.com · May 30, 2024

News Army

May 30, 2024

Modified date: May 30, 2024

Photo by Jake SeaWolf

The US military recently concluded a tunnel warfare exercise in Tifnit, Morocco, as part of African Lion 2024 (AL24), a premier joint exercise led by U.S. Army Southern European Task Force, Africa (SETAF-AF).

The exercise, held from April 19 to May 31, featured over 8,100 participants from 27 nations, including NATO contingents.

Tunnel warfare involves the use of tunnels and underground cavities for military operations, both for offensive and defensive purposes. It can include creating underground facilities to attack or defend, using existing natural caves, and constructing artificial underground structures. Tunnels can be used to undermine fortifications, launch surprise attacks, facilitate ambushes, conduct counterattacks, and move troops covertly. They can also serve as shelters from enemy attacks.

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The AL24 exercise included a range of scenarios, such as subterranean warfare, psychological operations, building clearing, combined assaults, fast-rope insertion, rappelling, and hostage rescue. These exercises are essential for preparing forces to operate in diverse and challenging environments.

Photo by Jake Seawolf

During the training, a remotely controlled Micro Tactical Ground Robot navigated a subterranean passage. Green Berets from the 19th Special Forces Group (Airborne), Utah National Guard, trained alongside partner forces near Tifnit, Morocco.

The ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas in 2023 highlighted the significance of tunnel warfare, with reports indicating that Hamas had constructed extensive tunnel networks under Gaza. Capturing and destroying these tunnels was a priority for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

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About author:

Dylan Malyasov

Dylan Malyasov is the editor-in-chief of Defence Blog. He is a journalist, an accredited defense advisor, and a consultant. His background as a defense advisor and consultant adds a unique perspective to his journalistic endeavors, ensuring that his reporting is well-informed and authoritative. read more

defence-blog.com · May 30, 2024

18. China's defence ministry condemns US missile deployment in Philippines

China's defence ministry condemns US missile deployment in Philippines

https://www.reuters.com/world/chinas-defence-ministry-condemns-us-missile-deployment-philippines-2024-05-30/?utm

By Laurie Chen and Mikhail Flores

May 31, 20245:33 AM EDTUpdated 4 hours ag

U.S. soldiers participate in the live fire exercise during the annual joint military exercises between U.S. and Philippine troops called "Balikatan" or shoulder-to-shoulder, at Laoag, Ilocos Norte, Philippines, May 6, 2024. REUTERS/Eloisa Lopez/File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights, opens new tab

BEIJING/MANILA, May 30 (Reuters) - China's defence ministry on Thursday strongly condemned the deployment of a U.S. intermediate range missile system in the northern Philippines during military drills in April, saying it "brought huge risks of war into the region".

Defence Ministry spokesperson Wu Qian told a press briefing in Beijing that China remained highly vigilant and opposed the deployment, the first in the Indo-Pacific region.

"The United States and Philippine practices put the entire region under the fire of the United States (and) brought huge risks of war into the region," Wu said, adding it "seriously undermined" regional peace.

"Intermediate-range missiles are strategic and offensive weapons with a strong Cold War colour," Wu said.

China deploys its own advanced intermediate-range missiles as part of an extensive conventional ballistic missile arsenal.

The U.S. said last month it had deployed its Typhon missile system to the Philippines as part of their Balikatan or "shoulder-to-shoulder" military drills.

Philippine military official Col. Michael Logico said in April that the missile system, which can fire Tomahawk land attack and SM-6 missiles, was brought to Laoag city in Ilocos Norte province in the northern Philippines.

The Philippines and U.S. military did not fire the missile system during the exercises, but Logico said it was shipped to test the feasibility of transporting the 40-ton weapon system by air.

Logico confirmed on Friday the missile system remains in the Philippines, but did not say where it is deployed and for how long it will stay in the country.

The annual drills this year involved around 16,000 Filipinos and U.S. soldiers, some of which were staged in northern Philippine islands near Taiwan and in western waters facing the South China Sea, where China is in dispute with the Philippines and other regional claimants.

The exercises irked China at the time and it warned of destabilisation when countries outside the region "flex muscles and stoke confrontation".

Philippine and U.S. officials had said the exercises were meant to improve interoperability between their forces and were not directed at any third country.

Coming soon: Get the latest news and expert analysis about the state of the global economy with Reuters Econ World. Sign up here.

Reporting by Laurie Chen in Beijing and Karen Lema and Mikhail Flores in Manila; Writing by Greg Torode; Editing by David Holmes

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

19. Five powers plan bigger, deeper Asia military drills

Excellent initiative. It is not only about the US all the time.

Five powers plan bigger, deeper Asia military drills

https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/five-powers-plan-bigger-deeper-asia-military-drills-2024-05-31/?utm

By Reuters

May 31, 20243:25 AM EDTUpdated 6 hours ag

Item 1 of 5 New Zealand's Defence Minister Judith Collins, Malaysia's Defence Minister Dato’ Seri Mohamed Khaled Nordin, Singapore’s Defence Minister Ng Eng Hen, Australia's Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister Richard Marles, and Britain’s Director General (Security Policy) Paul Wyatt attend the Shangri-La Dialogue for the Five Power Defence Arrangements (FPDA) Defence Ministers’ Joint Press Conference Meeting (FDMM) in Singapore May 31, 2024. REUTERS/Caroline Chia

[1/5]New Zealand's Defence Minister Judith Collins, Malaysia's Defence Minister Dato’ Seri Mohamed Khaled Nordin, Singapore’s Defence Minister Ng Eng Hen, Australia's Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister Richard Marles, and Britain’s Director General (Security Policy) Paul Wyatt attend the... Purchase Licensing Rights, opens new tab Read more

SINGAPORE, May 31 (Reuters) - Australia, Britain, Malaysia, New Zealand and Singapore have agreed to stage more complex military drills in the region this year involving drones, fifth-generation fighter planes and surveillance aircraft.

The announcement on Friday by defence ministers from members of the 53-year old Five Power Defence Arrangement (FPDA) on the sidelines of the Shangri-La Dialogue defence meeting in Singapore comes as the tempo of military exercises in Asia increases along with tensions between global powers.

"We are increasing the assets that we are bringing to bear in exercises so (at) Bersama Lima later this year, for the first time, Australia will be contributing F-35 Joint Strike Fighters," said Australian Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister Richard Marles.

Bersama Lima, "Five Together" in the Malay language, is an annual military exercise held by the five powers. It was held last year in Malaysia.

Marles said running more complicated exercises were an example of increasing ambition in the agenda of the FPDA. New Zealand's Defence Minister Judith Collins said a P-8 Poseidon would be deployed to Singapore for the first time as part of the drills.

The P-8 aircraft is the premier U.S. submarine hunter-tracker and is increasingly deployed in the region against China's submarine patrols.

Singapore is close to important submarine channels in Indonesia linking the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean.

Marles said the FPDA was "not about China" but rather about "our desire to work closely together". Malaysian Defence Minister Mohamed Khaled Nordin said this year's exercises would involve drones, among other "non-conventional" elements.

British representative Paul Wyatt, director general for security policy, said Britain planned sending an aircraft carrier to the region in 2025 and had discussed how the tour might fit with the FPDA's exercise programme.

Coming soon: Get the latest news and expert analysis about the state of the global economy with Reuters Econ World. Sign up here.

Reporting by Tom Westbrook; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan

20. Ice Dragon: China’s Antarctic Strategy

Excerpts;

Recognizing that an opponent is playing a different game is critical for Antarctic stakeholders like Australia and the United States. Unlike chess, as Lai points out, the philosophy behind Go is “to compete for relative gain rather than seeking complete annihilation of the opponent forces.” To counter China’s Antarctic objectives, Australia and the United States must maintain a positive narrative toward the current ATS structure, while also encouraging joint scientific research with China to highlight the benefits of the current governance structure.

The ATS remains one of the most successful global treaties and stands to support scientific and environmental advances long into the future. As leading nations within the ATS, Australia and the United States must work harder to utilize public diplomacy and push a positive narrative regarding the status quo. In the context of wider global competition, it is no longer sufficient to simply expect the success of the treaty to stand on its own merits. The United States and Australia must improve their messaging campaign to match the strength of China’s information operations and aggressive narrative building.

The CCP is determined to challenge the rules-based global order, attain elevated status and power, and exploit untapped natural resources on the frozen continent. China’s strategy for Antarctica incorporates strategic patience, technological innovation, international influence, and access to South Pacific territories. To contend with China’s theory of victory, Australia and the United States do not need to annihilate or aggressively posture against China but rather develop a policy that centers on strategic patience and relative gain in Antarctica.

Ice Dragon: China’s Antarctic Strategy - Modern War Institute

mwi.westpoint.edu · by Jenna Higgins · May 31, 2024

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China’s interest in Antarctica has been a consistent—and proportionate—feature of its rise as a global power. Its interest stems in part from the frozen continent’s wealth of untapped natural resources that could potentially secure Beijing’s economic prosperity well into the future. The important question for policymakers, however, is not why China has polar aspirations but how it intends to achieve them.

Although there are limits to the utility of analogizing Beijing’s strategy to the ancient Chinese game of Go, it does offer a useful framework within which to assess China’s Antarctic objectives. The game—the original name of which, Weiqi, translates essentially as “encircling territory”—emphasizes a strategic model centered on building territory, creating connections, and forcing opponents into defensive positions. China’s quest to be recognized as a polar great power utilizes technological innovation, international influence, and strategic access in the South Pacific (a gateway to the Southern Ocean, surrounding Antarctica) as key objectives. Analyzing these objectives in the context of Go strategy offers Australia and the United States an opportunity to create an Antarctic policy underscored by strategic patience, relative advantage, and resolute unity.

The Antarctic Treaty System (ATS) was established in 1959 following a US-led conference with eleven other nations that had participated in the International Geophysical Year. The intent of the conference was to “draft a treaty that would address military and geopolitical tensions, accommodate the various positions on claims and promote cooperation through science.” While the result was touted as one of the most successful multilateral treaties in history, it crucially overlooked several large but developing nations—China among them. In the subsequent decades, as China grew economically, it sought to redress its exclusion.

China committed significant resources to Antarctic infrastructure and consequently achieved consultative status in 1985 and has continued to work consistently on improving its infrastructure, policies, and scientific research in the decades since. By 2006, in a clear demonstration of intent, the People’s Liberation Army designated China’s vertical world map (featuring both the Arctic and Antarctica) as an official military map, placing the Antarctic continent front and center. China has used this worldview to determine the location of its BeiDou satellite constellation and receiving stations, but it may also be used to determine any number of military courses of action, including how to improve physical access to Antarctica.

In 2015, the government under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) made a rare public announcement that “polar regions, the deep seabed, and outer space” are China’s “new strategic frontiers.” More significantly, Beijing specified that these “global commons” are strategically important areas from which it will claim the resources needed for China to become a global power. Without secure access to energy imports, China’s economic projections appear dire.

While the mining of Antarctica for resources is currently prohibited under the 1991 Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty, Beijing maintains an eye on the vast resources it holds. Researchers estimate there to be “500 billion tons of oil on the Antarctic continent and 300 to 500 billion tons of natural gas, plus a potential 135 billion tons of oil in the Southern Ocean.” With time on Beijing’s side and a history of demonstrated strategic patience, future Antarctic resource exploitation offers a strong rationale for Chinese national interest in the frozen continent.

In addition to China’s strategic interest in polar resources, its physical presence and ability to influence Antarctic policy projects power. In 2013, senior Chinese polar officials stated that “China’s goal of becoming a polar great power was a key component of Beijing’s maritime strategy.” Specifically, as Anne-Marie Brady, a professor and specialist in Chinese and polar politics, argues, gaining “access to all the opportunities available in the Arctic and Antarctic are essential for China to achieve its goal of restoring its international status and becoming a ‘rich country with a strong army’ (fu guo qiang bing).”

A CCP policy journal further elaborates that “the existing international maritime norms have been set by the West, and in many ways they are disadvantageous to [China’s] maritime strategy. . . . China must defend its national interests and be very involved in the process and application of international law.” Strong statements of intent such as these provide important insight into CCP logic and policy objectives. The CCP is cognizant that a strong maritime strategy supports power projection and the equal attainment of polar great power status. In turn, achieving both is a vital requirement for undisputable great power status.

Go is about advantage when demonstrating patience. The game values tactics that reveal long-term and calculated strategic interest. This type of strategy is “rather uncharacteristic of American mindset and behavior,” explains author David Lai. “When Americans take action, they expect immediate return,” he writes. However, Go “offers Americans the opportunity to nurture such sensibilities.”

China’s Antarctic tactics include the pursuit of innovative capability developments and specialized hardware such as nuclear-powered icebreakers. Aligned with its aspirations to be considered a maritime power and its adoption of Mahanian principles of seapower, China has invested significant resources into enhancing its blue-water naval capability. In a 2014 speech, Chinese President Xi Jinping explicitly connected “China’s development as a polar power to the even more significant goal of China becoming a maritime great power.” Accordingly, substantial investment has been made in the development of nuclear-powered icebreakers. To date, the only other country with a like capability is Russia. China’s conceptual designs include a “38,000-ton vessel able to operate in up to three meters of ice.” The China State Shipbuilding Corporation, responsible for developing the country’s nuclear submarines, promotes the development of multiple nuclear-powered icebreakers for three “strategic demands”—namely, polar “shipping, energy, and national security.” While likely to have been initially developed to support China’s Arctic Ocean capabilities, the connection to the Antarctic program is apparent.

China also seeks to gain polar great power status by increasing its influence and creating the possibility of change within the ATS. Beijing’s grievances are primarily founded on its lack of participation in “the scramble for Antarctica during the ‘Heroic Age’ of Antarctic exploration”—a concern shared by several other developing nations, including India. China has publicly stated its desire to amend the 1991 Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty, which designates Antarctica as a “natural reserve, devoted to peace and science” and “prohibits all activities relating to Antarctic mineral resources, except for scientific research.” Amending the protocol may be possible from 2048 if a “majority of all Parties, including three-quarters of the Consultative Parties” agree to changes and a legal regime on mineral resources is in place. To achieve change within the ATS, then, China must influence like-minded consultative countries to vote in favor of amending the protocol. It has some twenty-four years to prepare and execute a revisionist Antarctic strategy.

The creation of strategic partnerships for physical basing to support Antarctic logistics is a further component of China’s Antarctic strategy. Historically, Chinese expeditions have transited via Hobart, Australia, or Christchurch, New Zealand. While these locations currently remain viable options, political relationships with individual nations can be fraught and may present future geopolitical issues, especially when viewed over a long time frame. New Zealand, for instance, has implemented strict, long-standing legislation making the entire country a nuclear-free zone. The legislation prohibits nuclear-powered vessels from docking in any New Zealand port and was actively enforced in 1985 when New Zealand denied entry to the USS Buchanan, a US Navy guided missile destroyer. Accordingly, once China has fully operational nuclear-powered icebreakers, it will no longer be able to rely on New Zealand as a replenishment location.

The need for Beijing to diversify Antarctic gateway points and build liberties (a Go term that signifies adjacent empty space and is essential for building a territory) also drives Beijing’s strategy. One possible alternative for Antarctic replenishment and staging is the Solomon Islands. In April 2022, China signed a minimum five-year security agreement with the island nation. Leaked copies of the document indicate a provision for China to use the port for replenishment activities. Specifically, it says that “China may, according to its own needs and with the consent of the Solomon Islands, make ship visits to, carry out logistics replenishment in, and have stopover and transition in the Solomon Islands.”

Of course, the notion that China views the Solomon Islands as simply a replenishment port for Antarctic expeditions is a narrow oversimplification. China has demonstrated an ability to improve overall influence through the “string of pearls” concept. Economic support to build and restore civilian infrastructure equally benefits several underdeveloped nations struggling for resources, such as East Timor.

Recognizing that an opponent is playing a different game is critical for Antarctic stakeholders like Australia and the United States. Unlike chess, as Lai points out, the philosophy behind Go is “to compete for relative gain rather than seeking complete annihilation of the opponent forces.” To counter China’s Antarctic objectives, Australia and the United States must maintain a positive narrative toward the current ATS structure, while also encouraging joint scientific research with China to highlight the benefits of the current governance structure.

The ATS remains one of the most successful global treaties and stands to support scientific and environmental advances long into the future. As leading nations within the ATS, Australia and the United States must work harder to utilize public diplomacy and push a positive narrative regarding the status quo. In the context of wider global competition, it is no longer sufficient to simply expect the success of the treaty to stand on its own merits. The United States and Australia must improve their messaging campaign to match the strength of China’s information operations and aggressive narrative building.

The CCP is determined to challenge the rules-based global order, attain elevated status and power, and exploit untapped natural resources on the frozen continent. China’s strategy for Antarctica incorporates strategic patience, technological innovation, international influence, and access to South Pacific territories. To contend with China’s theory of victory, Australia and the United States do not need to annihilate or aggressively posture against China but rather develop a policy that centers on strategic patience and relative gain in Antarctica.

Jenna Higgins is an officer in the Royal Australian Air Force and a distinguished graduate of the United States Air Command and Staff College. She has maritime patrol and ISR EW experience in multiple theaters of operation. Jenna holds a bachelor of science in physics and a master of strategy and security from the University of New South Wales, Canberra, and a master of aerosystems from Kingston University London.

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

Image credit: 黃逸樂（世界首窮）

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mwi.westpoint.edu · by Jenna Higgins · May 31, 2024

21. Myanmar Is Fragmenting—but Not Falling Apart

Excerpts:

As the junta looks increasingly fragile and loses control of most of the country’s borders, however, Myanmar’s neighbors have started to adjust their policies. Bangladesh understands that the million-plus Rohingya refugees it hosts cannot be repatriated without the agreement of the Arakan Army, which now oversees the areas from which the Rohingya were expelled and to which they would return. In February, India announced an end to a long-standing policy that had allowed residents of border communities to move freely between the two countries; it has also begun the construction of a costly 1,000-mile border fence. Both moves are signs that New Delhi’s close relationship with the junta in Naypyitaw is no longer proving useful in securing India’s northeastern border, where multiple Indian insurgent groups operate. And Thailand’s prime minister, Srettha Thavisin, has publicly said the Myanmar regime is “losing” its battle to consolidate control of the country. His government has stepped up engagement with the Karen National Union following the Myanmar military’s temporary defeat at the border town of Myawaddy in April.

Myanmar’s junta is unhappy that these countries are beginning to hedge their bets, but there is little it can do about the situation. It has few international allies other than Russia, which is distracted by its war in Ukraine and unable to offer much tangible support. Beijing, which dislikes Min Aung Hlaing and believes his regime to be incompetent, is in no mood to lend a helping hand, either. With the military thus isolated, other countries’ engagement with nonstate administrations is unlikely to tip the scale of the conflict one way or the other. These administrations are almost certainly here to stay. Working with them is therefore the only feasible way to help improve the lives of the people in the areas they control.

An international system built on the primacy of relationships between nation-states is too restrictive a framework for dealing with Myanmar today. Foreign governments and international institutions must engage with nonstate groups to address acute humanitarian needs and improve governance. Myanmar’s fragmentation may be unavoidable, but it does not have to be catastrophic for its people.

Myanmar Is Fragmenting—but Not Falling Apart

Why Outside Actors Should Work More Closely With Nonstate Groups

By Richard Horsey

May 31, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by Richard Horsey · May 31, 2024

The conflict in Myanmar, now in its fourth year, has claimed thousands of civilian lives and displaced more than three million people. Since toppling the democratically elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi in February 2021, the military junta under General Min Aung Hlaing has failed to consolidate its authority. Over the last seven months, the military has suffered a succession of humiliating defeats at the hands of opposition forces.

Myanmar is undergoing fragmentation: large parts of the country, including most of Myanmar’s international borders, are now under the dominion of various ethnic armed groups. These groups are expanding control of their ethnic homelands and building autonomous statelets. But this does not necessarily mean the country is headed for a catastrophic collapse with the kind of chaotic intergroup violence that has played out in other fractured states, such as Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

At the same time, fragmentation has greatly diminished the prospects for building a federal union in Myanmar. Doing so would require regional rulers to cede partial authority to a central government and nonstate forces to disarm, both of which are extremely unlikely. Rather than trying to forge a grand political solution to the current conflict, outside actors should accept the messy reality. Given the most probable alternatives—a protracted war, a consolidation of military rule, or both—decentralized control of disparate parts of the country may be the least ruinous outcome.

UNCONSOLIDATED PUTSCH

In the immediate aftermath of the 2021 coup, the military’s brutal crackdown on peaceful protests pushed people across the country to form armed resistance groups. Many of these groups joined forces with ethnic armies that have been fighting the Myanmar state for decades. Violence has now engulfed much of the country, pitting regime forces against hundreds of resistance groups, from small units to organized militias equipped with modern light arms.

The newly formed rebel groups lacked the numbers, coordination, and heavy weaponry necessary to attack military bases or other well-defended positions. Still, they conducted effective ambushes on military convoys and hundreds of other targets, such as checkpoints, administrative offices, and military-linked businesses; they also carried out extrajudicial killings of alleged informants.

Initially, many of the country’s ethnic armed groups remained on the sidelines, waiting to see how events would unfold before taking any action. The picture changed dramatically in late October, when a coalition of three of the country’s most powerful ethnic armies went on the offensive. The Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army, the Ta’ang National Liberation Army, and the Arakan Army launched a blitzkrieg on towns and military bases in northern Shan State, on the border with China. Armed and experienced, they delivered a rapid series of humiliating defeats to the Myanmar military, expelling it from large swaths of territory. The capture of border towns and transport routes has disrupted trade with China, stemming an important stream of revenue for the junta. By laying bare the military’s weakness, these victories inspired other ethnic armed groups and allied resistance forces to join the offensive across the country’s periphery.

In the west, the Arakan Army has taken control of most of Rakhine State, including the border with Bangladesh. Soon, it may capture the state capital, Sittwe, as well as the deep-sea port at Kyaukpyu and the military’s regional command headquarters in nearby Ann. In the far northern Kachin State, the Kachin Independence Army has seized strategic bases and an important border trading post, further curtailing trade with China, and is now within striking distance of Kachin’s capital, Myitkyina. In the southeast, on the Thai border, the Karen National Union has significantly expanded its territory and cut off much of the overland trade with Thailand. In April, it temporarily ousted the military from the border town of Myawaddy before regime forces reoccupied it with the help of a rival Karen faction. Elsewhere, the junta has failed to recoup most of its lost territory. It is also struggling to replenish its troops, as thousands have surrendered to rebel groups or fled. The regime’s decision in February to enforce a conscription law reveals its desperation.

CENTRIFUGAL FORCES

The military’s failures on the battlefield, along with the country’s deepening economic crisis, have led to widespread elite discontent with Min Aung Hlaing. His days as leader of the junta may be numbered, although it remains unclear who will replace him, or when. The military itself is not yet on the verge of collapse. Its most powerful opponents are ethnic armies that operate on the country’s periphery, and they are unlikely to try to bring the war to the capital, Naypyitaw, or the Yangon-Mandalay corridor, where a majority of Myanmar’s population resides. Rather than trying to topple the junta, the major ethnic armed groups are focused on consolidating control over their newly expanded territories.

What they seek is the establishment of permanent ethnic homelands, in some cases explicitly modeled on Wa State, a self-ruling enclave on the Chinese border. Wa leaders accept that their territory is part of Myanmar, but they govern autonomously, maintaining an army strong enough to deter any attempt to bring the region under state control. The desire among other groups to emulate the Wa model stems in part from their historical experience of living under successive imperious governments dominated by the Burman majority. In part, too, these groups simply want to insulate themselves from the post-coup chaos in central Myanmar. Some observers hope that the weakening of central military control and the establishment of decentralized power structures could begin a process of “bottom-up federalism” that ends in stable national governance. Others see it as a worrying slide toward Balkanization, in which multiple statelets become locked in cycles of competitive violence. Both perspectives miss something crucial.

The process of state building at the regional level makes progress toward federalism at the national level more challenging. Any federal solution—the aspiration of many in Myanmar after decades of unresolved minority grievances and civil war—would require ethnic minority administrations to cede partial power to a national government. Armed groups that have gained control over their ethnic homelands at a tremendous cost in lives and resources are unlikely to make such compromises. They will be reluctant to trade the authority they now enjoy, including control of their own armed forces, for a turbulent experiment in federal democracy.

These groups aim to maintain their armies to safeguard their autonomy and, in some cases, to preserve control over lucrative natural resources (such as jade, gems, and minerals) and illicit sources of income (such as drug production, casinos, and scam centers). This preference for a confederation of autonomous ethnic zones is not limited to ethnic minority areas. Even in some Burman-majority regions, the idea of de facto self-rule is gaining momentum and local communities, organizations, and armed resistance groups are starting to put the administrative building blocks in place. All this threatens to leave Myanmar as a collection of statelets, with a rump state at the center.

ASCENDANT ANTIFEDERALISM

Although the emergence of “one country, many systems” may be incompatible with federalism, it need not lead to catastrophic Balkanization, either. Myanmar is not a well-functioning state that is suddenly breaking apart. It has been in a situation of partial collapse since it gained independence in 1948. Large areas of the uplands, which are home to ethnic minority groups, have never been under the control of any central government and have long managed disputes among themselves. In areas controlled by Karen National Union and Kachin Independence Organization armed groups, for example, sophisticated governance structures have evolved over the decades, along with a vibrant civil society. More nascent ethnic armed group administrations—such as those being developed by the Ta’ang National Liberation Army in Shan State, the Arakan Army in Rakhine State, and Karenni forces in Kayah State—are drawing lessons and inspiration from these models of self-government.

The emergence of quasi-independent statelets is likely the least bad outcome for Myanmar in the medium term. The most probable alternative, after all, is not peace under a federal democratic system, but brutal war. Any attempt to negotiate a grand solution to the country’s failed state-building process amid the current conflict and political crisis would likely result in more violence, not less. A settlement would create losers as well as winners, and the losers would certainly have the means to mount an armed response.

This is not to question the value of building consensus around the many divisive political issues in Myanmar. The work of civil society and opposition groups that have emerged since the coup can help facilitate state-building efforts in the future. But in the near term, it is important to recognize that bringing Myanmar’s disparate political actors into agreement on a federal structure, which was always going to be an intractable task, has become even more difficult as the country’s politics have fractured since the coup.

The emergence of quasi-independent statelets is likely the least bad outcome for Myanmar in the medium term.

Neighboring countries, Western donors, and multilateral institutions need to accept the reality of Myanmar as a fragmented state. They must be willing to engage with ethnic armed group administrations to deliver critical humanitarian and development assistance, taking care not to inflame conflict in the process. International donors also must carefully calibrate their engagement based on armed groups’ willingness to abide by fundamental human rights norms, such as respect for minorities in areas under their control. Convincing outside actors, particularly neighboring countries, to work with Myanmar’s nonstate authorities will not be easy. Apart from China, which has long engaged with armed groups along its shared border, Myanmar’s other neighbors are wary that developing deeper relationships with subnational administrations could draw the ire of the junta. They also worry about undermining the principle of state sovereignty—and the signal such diplomatic overtures may send to their own insurgent or separatist groups. This concern is most acute for India, but it echoes in Bangladesh, Laos, and Thailand, which have all experienced ethnic-based insurgencies.

As the junta looks increasingly fragile and loses control of most of the country’s borders, however, Myanmar’s neighbors have started to adjust their policies. Bangladesh understands that the million-plus Rohingya refugees it hosts cannot be repatriated without the agreement of the Arakan Army, which now oversees the areas from which the Rohingya were expelled and to which they would return. In February, India announced an end to a long-standing policy that had allowed residents of border communities to move freely between the two countries; it has also begun the construction of a costly 1,000-mile border fence. Both moves are signs that New Delhi’s close relationship with the junta in Naypyitaw is no longer proving useful in securing India’s northeastern border, where multiple Indian insurgent groups operate. And Thailand’s prime minister, Srettha Thavisin, has publicly said the Myanmar regime is “losing” its battle to consolidate control of the country. His government has stepped up engagement with the Karen National Union following the Myanmar military’s temporary defeat at the border town of Myawaddy in April.

Myanmar’s junta is unhappy that these countries are beginning to hedge their bets, but there is little it can do about the situation. It has few international allies other than Russia, which is distracted by its war in Ukraine and unable to offer much tangible support. Beijing, which dislikes Min Aung Hlaing and believes his regime to be incompetent, is in no mood to lend a helping hand, either. With the military thus isolated, other countries’ engagement with nonstate administrations is unlikely to tip the scale of the conflict one way or the other. These administrations are almost certainly here to stay. Working with them is therefore the only feasible way to help improve the lives of the people in the areas they control.

An international system built on the primacy of relationships between nation-states is too restrictive a framework for dealing with Myanmar today. Foreign governments and international institutions must engage with nonstate groups to address acute humanitarian needs and improve governance. Myanmar’s fragmentation may be unavoidable, but it does not have to be catastrophic for its people.

Richard Horsey is Senior Adviser on Myanmar at Crisis Group.

Foreign Affairs · by Richard Horsey · May 31, 2024

22. New Cold War proxy conflict brewing in Myanmar

Oh ... the Elephant cages. We had one at Torii Station in Okinawa.

On a serious note, we need to pay attention to the civil war in Burma.

Excerpts:

Most importantly, it served as a military intelligence terminal for communications between the US and its various intelligence sites in Southeast and East Asia. A similar facility was established near Lampang south of Chiang Mai, for the specific purpose of monitoring radio traffic in northern Myanmar and Yunnan.

American Chinese language experts translated intercepted messages into English, and Burmese-speaking Shans translated messages in Burmese into Thai and English. A major target at that time was the China-supported CPB. Over the years, the “Elephant Cages” became obsolete and today there are more advanced and sophisticated ways of monitoring movements in cyberspace, as well as on the ground.

The New Cold War may not yet be as hot as the previous one was, but it is clear that the Americans and their allies are building a bulwark against China across Asia, seen overtly in the AUKUS, Quad and new Squad multilateral security arrangements geared to contain Beijing’s rise.

But the construction of a huge new US consulate general in Chiang Mai and financial support for the pro-democracy forces inside Myanmar are also part of this larger China, and by bloc association, Russia containment strategy.

There is still a long way to go before we see the return to the open Cold War proxy confrontations of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. But conflict-ridden Myanmar may well once again find itself in the eye of a new geopolitical storm over which it will have little or no control.

New Cold War proxy conflict brewing in Myanmar - Asia Times

Myanmar’s civil war not seen in same light as Ukraine or Gaza but rival superpower interests could yet determine conflict’s direction and duration

asiatimes.com · by Bertil Lintner · May 31, 2024

By any measure, it would be a stretch to say that the United States is currently engaged in a New Cold War proxy war with China and Russia in Myanmar.

But as the conflict between the State Administration Council (SAC) junta and a proliferating array of ethnic and political resistance armies escalates, the rivalry between the world’s two big blocs could yet determine the outcome of Myanmar’s increasingly vicious civil war.

On one side, the US is supporting the anti-coup National Unity Government (NUG) and by extension its affiliated People’s Defense Forces armed groups scattered across the country. On the other, China and Russia are more clearly, although not always overtly, in the junta’s camp.

With its substantial and geostrategically important investments in Myanmar, China has the biggest great power interest in the war’s direction and outcome.

While Beijing is playing both sides of the war — selling military hardware to the SAC and turning a blind eye to Chinese weaponry ending up in the hands of some of the ethnic resistance armies — it clearly doesn’t want the conflict to spiral out of control to the degree it hurts or threatens its in-country interests.

The US, for its part, appears to have refrained from directly providing the various armed groups fighting the junta with weapons and has confined its support to “non-lethal” aid to the NUG, which notably maintains an office in Washington DC.

If the US sought to escalate the Myanmar war into a New Cold War proxy theater, targeting China’s big-ticket interests in the country would be a logical tactic.

Significantly, the many armed groups opposed to military rule have so far refrained from targeting China’s interests in the country, including the gas pipelines that run the length of the country and thus would be easy to attack or disrupt.

If the US wanted to be more overtly involved at the battlefield level, it would need to do so through Thailand, which like China has no interest in stirring instability that could spill over its borders in a bigger way.

Thailand also relies on Myanmar’s natural gas and so has an incentive not to rile the generals through any hint it may be funneling arms to insurgent groups. The US has thus seemingly focused its diplomacy on pressing the Thais to turn a blind eye to the NUG and other exile forces that operate from Thai soil, including in the border town of Mae Sot.

Protesters hold posters in support of the National Unity Government (NUG) during a demonstration against the military coup on ‘Global Myanmar Spring Revolution Day’ in Taunggyi, Shan state, on May 2, 2021. Photo: Asia Times Files / AFP / Stringer

To be sure, the US may still be providing more clandestine aid to the resistance than it publicly acknowledges, including potentially through elements in the Thai military known to be sympathetic with certain ethnic armies. But if so it has not been to a degree or manner that could turn the war or threaten China’s position.

China’s reasons for aspiring to influence, contain and even control Myanmar’s conflict are obvious and many. Myanmar is the only immediate neighbor which provides China with convenient, direct access to the Indian Ocean, bypassing the contested South China Sea and congested Strait of Malacca, which the US could potentially block in a conflict scenario.

Such a connection is vital for the export of Chinese goods to the outside world as well as the importation of fossil fuel from the Middle East and minerals from Africa. That is why China has built oil and gas pipelines from the shores of the Bay of Bengal to its southern province of Yunnan and plans to construct highways and a high-speed rail along the same route.

As part of the plan, Chinese state-owned entities are developing a US$7.3 billion deep-water port at Kyaukphyu on the coast of Myanmar’s Rakhine State and a US$1.3 billion special economic zone (SEZ), which includes an oil and gas terminal.

Those projects are located at the lower end of the 1,700-kilometer China-Myanmar Economic Corridor (CMEC) connecting Kunming in China’s Yunnan province to the Indian Ocean.

As such, Beijing will do everything in its power to protect its geostrategic interests — and it does not take lightly any attempt by what it considers outsiders to interfere with its long-term plans for Myanmar and the region.

Having supported the insurgent Communist Party of Burma (CPB) in the late 1960s and early 1970s, China’s foreign policy changed after the death of Mao Zedong in 1976 and the subsequent rise of reformist Deng Xiaoping. His new China no longer attempted to export revolution; now it was all about economic development and the establishment of trade with the outside world.

The aftermath of the Myanmar military’s bloody suppression of a pro-democracy uprising in 1988 provided China with the opening it craved. While the West imposed sanctions and boycotts against the junta in Yangon, China began to promote cross-border trade — and in the decade after the massacres, China sold more than US$1.4 billion worth of aircraft, naval vessels, heavy artillery, anti-aircraft guns, and tanks to Myanmar.

China also helped Myanmar upgrade its naval bases along the coast and on islands in the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea. Chinese-supplied radar systems were installed in some of these bases, and it is reasonable to assume that China’s security services benefited from the resulting intelligence.

But the fiercely nationalistic Myanmar military never felt wholly comfortable with its heavy dependence on China for arms and supplies. The Chinese were treating Myanmar as a client state and many Myanmar army officers could not forget that thousands of their soldiers had been killed by the CPB’s Chinese-supplied guns before that insurgency collapse in 1989.

In order to diversify its sources of procurement, the Myanmar military began to cultivate defense ties with Russia. Myanmar became a lucrative market for the Russian war industry. Myanmar bought Russian-made MiG-29s jet fighters and Mi-35 Hind helicopter gunships, both of which are now being used across the country against the resistance.

Two Myanmar fighter jets seen firing shots during an exercise in Meiktila in 2019. Image: State Media

Russia also shipped heavy machine guns and rocket launchers to Myanmar and before the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Russian-made tanks and armored personnel carriers were obtained through dealers in Ukraine. Moreover, Russian military instructors have been spotted at a Myanmar airfield, presumably to assist in the maintenance of the attack helicopters.

Such training is not new, however; probably as many as 5,000 Myanmar soldiers and scientists have studied in Russia since the early 1990s, more than from any other Southeast Asian country.

It is unclear to what extent Russia, which after its invasion of Ukraine needs all the military hardware it has at its disposal, has been able to continue selling weaponry and parts to Myanmar.

But in February 2023, Russia’s state-owned nuclear corporation Rosatom and the SAC’s Ministry of Science and Technology signed a memorandum of understanding to build a small nuclear power plant in Myanmar.

A similar agreement was signed in 2007 under which Russia agreed to build a nuclear research reactor in Myanmar, but nothing substantial happened until this new agreement was concluded last year.

While China has geostrategic interests in Myanmar, Russia is more concerned about making money, though Russia’s involvement in the war cannot be explained solely in the context of business deals. Significantly, while China and Russia are in lockstep in the Ukraine war, there is little evidence they are acting in tandem in Myanmar.

The erstwhile Soviet Union was once a major power in Asia and also a bitter enemy of not only the United States but also China, which saw the leaders in Moscow as “revisionists” and “traitors” to the communist cause.

The Soviet Union had a close alliance with India and pro-Moscow regimes were in power in Vietnam, Laos and, after the Vietnamese intervention in 1978-79, also Cambodia.

All of that disappeared after the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the beginning of Boris Yeltsin’s chaotic rule in Russia, which then became a separate country.

It needed the firmer hand of his successor Vladimir Putin to restore some of the old glory, and now the Chinese became allies in common cause against the United States and its power in the Indo-Pacific region.

Russian influence over its old allies has vanished, but Myanmar has become a willing new partner in Moscow’s plans for playing a greater role in regional affairs.

And Russia does not seem to care how and against whom the SAC is using its supplied weaponry. While the Myanmar Army has performed poorly on the ground, it has had to increasingly rely on Russian-supplied air power, including helicopter gunships, which have been strafing resistance-held towns and villages across the country, probably killing thousands of civilians.

China has been more cautious in its dealings with the hugely unpopular SAC. It has not, for instance, like Russia, invited junta leader Senior General Min Aung Hlaing to make high-profile visits since the coup.

Anti-Chinese demonstrations were held outside the Chinese embassy in Yangon in the coup’s immediate aftermath, where angry protesters railed against the Chinese for describing the democracy-suspending putsch as a mere “cabinet reshuffle.”

Myanmar protesters in front of the Chinese embassy in Yangon after the February 1, 2021, coup. Photo: Facebook

According to a United Nations report released on May 17, 2023, China has sold at least $267 million worth of weapons and related material to Myanmar since the coup.

But the resistance in the north is also being equipped with Chinese weapons obtained through the United Wa State Army (UWSA), which grew out of the ashes of the CPB.

By playing both sides, China has been able to sell itself to the SAC as the only outside power that can act as a broker and peacemaker. China helped to negotiate a truce of sorts between some ethnic resistance armies in northern Shan state and the SAC.

And with the Arakan Army, which has also benefited from arms supplied by the UWSA, making significant headway in Rakhine State, it is only a matter of time before China intervenes in that conflict as well.

China has always claimed that it has the right to do so because the war is being fought dangerously close to Kyaukphyu. And, in the process, China can also force Japan’s Nippon Foundation, which until now has been the main peacemaker in Rakhine state, out of the area.

The Russians, on the other hand, have been blunter and cruder in their approach. Min Aung Hlaing has been welcomed with open arms in Moscow and Russian Deputy Defense Minister Alexander Vasilyevich Fomin, dressed in his full colonel-general uniform, has attended military ceremonies in Naypyitaw.

On the day before the February 2021 coup, a group of Russians and Myanmar colleagues had a party in Yangon, where the vodka reportedly flowed freely.

Apparently, they were celebrating the opening of a military high-tech multimedia complex in which the children of Min Aung Hlaing have a financial interest. They also reportedly toasted the coup that was going to be launched the following day.

The United States has reacted to these developments with utmost concern and issued statements in support for the struggle “for democracy, freedom, human rights, and justice” in Myanmar. Washington has also imposed various sanctions on SAC members and their business interests.

A US aid package provides $75 million for refugee assistance programs in Thailand and India, and $25 million for “technical support and non-lethal assistance” to the NUG, which was set up by the resistance after the 2021 coup.

Smaller amounts have been earmarked for “governance programs, documentation of atrocities, and assistance to political prisoners, Rohingya and deserters from the junta’s military.”

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At the same time, a massive, new US consulate general is under construction in the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai. In a colorful, online brochure, the project is described as “a concrete sign of our long-term commitment to the people of northern Thailand and the future of our partnership”, and the text goes on to state that the diplomatic mission is “dedicated to serving the local American community or those wishing to travel to the United States.”

Be that as it may, few doubt that it is more specifically part of a wider program to reinforce US intelligence capabilities in the region.

It would be no coincidence that Chiang Mai has been chosen as a strategic listening post.

The Americans first set up a diplomatic mission in Chiang Mai in 1950 which acted mainly as an intelligence station that coordinated support for nationalist Chinese, Kuomintang, forces that had retreated into Shan state in eastern Myanmar after their defeat in the Chinese Civil War.

The US consulate in Chiang Mai later oversaw the gathering of human as well as signals intelligence in the region during the Indochina wars. Local agents were sent across the border and the Americans together with the Thais maintained an extensive network of listening posts in northern Thailand.

The main such facility was located near Udon Thani in northeastern Thailand and consisted of, a large, circular array of Wullenweber antennas which was commonly referred to as the “Elephant Cage” because its shape resembled an elephant kraal. That facility picked up radio traffic from Laos, southern China and North Vietnam while also monitoring Chinese military movements in the region.

Artist’s concept of new US consulate in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Image: US State Department Brochure

Most importantly, it served as a military intelligence terminal for communications between the US and its various intelligence sites in Southeast and East Asia. A similar facility was established near Lampang south of Chiang Mai, for the specific purpose of monitoring radio traffic in northern Myanmar and Yunnan.

American Chinese language experts translated intercepted messages into English, and Burmese-speaking Shans translated messages in Burmese into Thai and English. A major target at that time was the China-supported CPB. Over the years, the “Elephant Cages” became obsolete and today there are more advanced and sophisticated ways of monitoring movements in cyberspace, as well as on the ground.

The New Cold War may not yet be as hot as the previous one was, but it is clear that the Americans and their allies are building a bulwark against China across Asia, seen overtly in the AUKUS, Quad and new Squad multilateral security arrangements geared to contain Beijing’s rise.

But the construction of a huge new US consulate general in Chiang Mai and financial support for the pro-democracy forces inside Myanmar are also part of this larger China, and by bloc association, Russia containment strategy.

There is still a long way to go before we see the return to the open Cold War proxy confrontations of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. But conflict-ridden Myanmar may well once again find itself in the eye of a new geopolitical storm over which it will have little or no control.

Bertil Lintner is a Thailand-based journalist and author who has written over 20 books on Myanmar, organized crime and regional security issues.

Shawn W. Crispin provided editing, fact-checking and reporting from Bangkok.

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asiatimes.com · by Bertil Lintner · May 31, 2024

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

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

If you do not read anything else in the 2017 National Security Strategy read this on page 14:

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

Access NSS HERE

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