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Quotes of the Day:
"The quintessential skill of an officer is to bring order out of chaos … To do that, and to be successful senior officers, you need to read, think, and write … I would argue you must write."
– Adm. James G. Stavridis
“Who knows why we were taught to fear the witches, and not those who burned them alive.”
–Affinity Soul
People are the thing I need more of – not just people, but the right people. We need problem solvers; we need thinkers."
– Lt. Gen. MIke Conley, AFSOC Commander
1. On Ukraine’s Snake Island, the Heart of the Battle for the Black Sea
2. In the Shadow of War: The Promise and Peril of Covert Action
3. Back to the Cold War: Russia uses Mexico as a hub for spying on the U.S.
4. Biden hosts his final Quad summit at his Delaware home, high school
5. Did Shohei Ohtani just play the single greatest baseball game ever?
6. The National Guard is in the crosshairs. Congress can save it
7. How a U.S. Ally Uses Aid as a Cover in War
8. I Survived Hamas Captivity, but I’m Not Yet Free
9. Ukraine Hits 2 More Russian Munition Depots, Aiming to Disrupt War Effort
10. From Crisis to Comeback: The Army is Turning the Tide on Recruitment
11. As Taliban starts restricting men too, some regret not speaking up sooner
12. Fact Sheet: 2024 Quad Leaders’ Summit
13. The Wilmington Declaration Joint Statement from the Leaders of Australia, India, Japan, and the United States
14. Israel’s Pager Attacks Have Changed the World
15. Who's Afraid of Vladimir Putin? by Sir Lawrence Freedman
16. Volodymyr Zelensky Has a Plan for Ukraine’s Victory
17. How Does the U.S.-China ‘Cold War’ End?
18. Report: Hezbollah pagers were detonated individually; attackers knew who and where the target was
19. Xi Jinping’s ‘gunboat diplomacy’ risks driving his bullied neighbours into enemy hands
20. New Zealand’s Army Chief: Pacific Nations Need Tailored Military Training
21. World leaders are gathering in New York for the U.N. General Assembly. The outlook is gloomy
22. Why Meta is now banning Russian propaganda
23. Chief of Naval Operations Discusses Navigation Plan 2024
24. The weaponization of everything has begun
1. On Ukraine’s Snake Island, the Heart of the Battle for the Black Sea
Video at the link.
Excerpts:
Ukraine is still reaping benefits from recapturing the island, which gave it a foothold in the Black Sea and threw a lifeline to its struggling economy by reopening exports worth billions. In the early hours one recent sunny morning, a line of grain ships snaking along the coast from Ukraine’s main port of Odesa was visible from a small craft heading to the island.
Recapturing the island was also a symbolic victory for Ukraine. The 40-acre outcrop gained iconic status on the first day of the war, when Russian warships approached and demanded the Ukrainian garrison surrender. A border guard responded by radio that the warships should “get f—d,” an act of resistance that characterized Ukraine’s underdog spirit and was later memorialized on a stamp and in songs.
Russia is still contesting Ukraine’s hold on the island, including with a missile strike on Aug. 24, Ukraine’s Independence Day, that left several soldiers concussed. The Journal visited the island with the permission of the Ukrainian military and agreed not to show sensitive military sites that could compromise security
On Ukraine’s Snake Island, the Heart of the Battle for the Black Sea
The Wall Street Journal was granted rare access to the patch of land that Ukraine recaptured in summer 2022
https://www.wsj.com/world/on-ukraines-snake-island-the-heart-of-the-battle-for-the-black-sea-5bc5744d?mod=latest_headlines
By James MarsonFollow and Nikita Nikolaienko | Photographs and videos by Emanuele Satolli for WSJ
Sept. 21, 2024 11:00 pm ET
SNAKE ISLAND, Ukraine—This rocky patch of land about 20 miles off the coast still bears the scars of the relentless Ukrainian assault to take it back. The Black Sea island is littered with the mangled remains of Russian military equipment and buildings that have been reduced to carcasses and piles of rubble.
A little more than two years ago, two Ukrainian commandos circling the island in a gyrocopter surveyed the scene of destruction, before descending for a small but important task.
Remnants of the island's past mark the landscape, from the wreckage of a Russian helicopter destroyed by a Ukrainian drone to a viewpoint overlooking the sea.
For weeks, Ukraine had pummeled the island’s Russian occupiers with artillery fire and aerial strikes, eventually forcing the Russians to retreat. The commandos came to the island a few days after the withdrawal. Swooping a few feet near the ground, one of them dropped a Ukrainian flag. He returned by boat days later and raised it on the island’s main flagpole, delivering the coup de grace in one of the most critical operations of the war.
The Wall Street Journal made a rare visit to Snake Island earlier this month and spoke with officers from Timur Special Unit, an elite unit of Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, who took part in its recapture in summer 2022. They revealed new details about one of the most celebrated chapters in Ukraine’s resistance against Russia’s invasion.
Troops traveling back and forth from the mainland face a bumpy ride over the waves, passing scars of the battle for the island like this felled wind turbine.
Ukraine is still reaping benefits from recapturing the island, which gave it a foothold in the Black Sea and threw a lifeline to its struggling economy by reopening exports worth billions. In the early hours one recent sunny morning, a line of grain ships snaking along the coast from Ukraine’s main port of Odesa was visible from a small craft heading to the island.
Recapturing the island was also a symbolic victory for Ukraine. The 40-acre outcrop gained iconic status on the first day of the war, when Russian warships approached and demanded the Ukrainian garrison surrender. A border guard responded by radio that the warships should “get f—d,” an act of resistance that characterized Ukraine’s underdog spirit and was later memorialized on a stamp and in songs.
Russia is still contesting Ukraine’s hold on the island, including with a missile strike on Aug. 24, Ukraine’s Independence Day, that left several soldiers concussed. The Journal visited the island with the permission of the Ukrainian military and agreed not to show sensitive military sites that could compromise security
The island and its surrounding waters have long been valued by militaries seeking a foothold in the Black Sea.
Controlling the sea
Snake Island has for centuries been disputed among the Black Sea powers because of its favorable location. After Ukraine declared independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, Kyiv constructed a firmer presence on the island to bolster its claim to the waters around it. That included a museum to the mythical Greek warrior Achilles, who was reputed to be buried on the island.
Snake Island
Russian forces in Ukraine
New approximate coastal shipping route
Ukraine
Dnipro
Mol.
Odesa
Romania
CRIMEA
Snake
Island
Black Sea
Bulgaria
Istanbul
100 miles
Turkey
100 km
Note: As of Sept. 18
Source: Institute for the Study of War and AEI’s Critical Threats Project; staff reports (new route)
Andrew Barnett/WSJ
“As the historical saying goes, ‘Whoever controls Snake Island, controls the sea,’ ” said an officer in HUR, Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, who uses the call sign Ned, in an interview on the island.
After seizing it in February 2022, Russia quickly moved air-defense missiles onto the island and multiple rocket-launch systems that could smash any approaching boats. Naval craft ferried troops and supplies from Crimea.
Ukraine’s efforts to take the island back started that April with the sinking of the Russian Black Sea Fleet’s flagship, the Moskva. Ukraine soon began striking the island relentlessly with missiles fired from drones and warplanes, sinking Russian boats and destroying a helicopter just after it landed.
Ukrainian forces placed 155mm self-propelled howitzers on barges and moved them around the Danube delta to firing positions inaccessible by land. Multiple-launch rocket systems called Uragan, or Hurricane, fired directly from barges.
“As soon as we started working systematically from the middle of June 2022, we forced them to abandon the island in two weeks,” said the HUR military-intelligence officer in charge of the operation, who is known by the call sign Shakespeare.
A museum, now damaged, showcases the island's purported links to Greek mythology, while a mine planted to fend off invasion speaks to the territory's more recent history.
‘A goodwill gesture’
On June 30, Moscow announced it was pulling out its troops in what it called “a goodwill gesture.”
That was when Shakespeare sent in the two commandos on a gyrocopter, including a 38-year-old officer known as Ramses, to check if the Russians had left. They chose the small craft as it was hard to spot on radar and carried only pistols. They dressed in shorts and Hawaiian shirts to masquerade as tourists if they were captured or ended up in Romanian waters.
A radio intercept indicated Russian special forces were still present on the island, but they didn’t open fire and were later evacuated by boat. Ramses and the pilot soon returned and dropped the flag.
Commandos drop a Ukrainian flag on Snake Island in early July 2022, in this video provided by Timur Special Unit.
It is the kind of unconventional approach that HUR is renowned for. The agency is led by Lt. Gen. Kyrylo Budanov, a 38-year-old career officer who is revered by his men for his own commando raiding in Crimea after Russia seized the peninsula in 2014.
Soon after the gyrocopter flight, Ukrainian special forces briefly landed on the island and raised a Ukrainian flag on the lower part, before Russia bombarded the area with missiles from a warplane.
Ramses, a career military man, and five other commandos from Timur Special Unit returned on a stealthier mission to secure Ukraine’s control of the island.
Ramses, a Ukrainian military intelligence officer, was among the commandos involved in daring operations to recapture Snake Island.
They approached the cliff on the western side of the island in a low-slung river craft under cover of darkness. Four of them led by Ramses scaled the cliff and worked their way slowly through buildings and past equipment that had been extensively booby trapped by the departing Russians. Amid rain and fog, they started clearing mines and swept up documents that had been left in a hurry. Ramses recovered the flag he had dropped and raised it.
The weather had worsened while they were on shore. On the way back to the mainland, violent waves knocked out their boat’s two motors then overwhelmed it, forcing them to transfer to an inflatable craft with no motor, only oars.
The boat was soon swept out to sea, in the direction of gas drilling rigs where Russian troops were stationed. Ramses sought to rally the men in a seemingly hopeless situation. “Guys, I need to bring up my son,” he said. “I won’t give up so easily. No one will give up without a fight.”
Ukrainian soldiers on Snake Island train in a makeshift outdoor gym and swim along the shore.
The commandos spent the night constantly bailing out water that crashed over the boat’s sides and using a pump to keep it inflated. Another soldier, known as Hunter, tried to radio for help. Standing on a pier on the mainland, Shakespeare heard a brief, crackled message: “This is Hunter, can anyone hear me?” Shakespeare responded and received a rough location.
With no help at hand and the boat still drifting toward the Russian-held rigs, Ramses asked the other men how many magazines they had for their rifles. Each man had about three or four, hardly enough to take on a Russian stronghold.
“I’ll be the assault group,” Ramses said, making light of the predicament. “You can cover me.”
Then, in the skies above, they saw a gyrocopter dispatched by Shakespeare to search for them. They set off a flare, and the pilot eventually spotted them and directed a boat to rescue them after 28 hours at sea.
Ammunition left by Russian soldiers and an antitank mine lie on the ground on Snake Island.
Ramses later returned to the island with a team to complete the demining and allow a garrison to be established there. The troops are supplied by small speedboats that leap off the crests of waves and smash into their troughs, jarring the backs of those on board who sit on the floor gripping ropes.
Despite the destruction on the island and the continued Russian threat, there are moments of tranquility. One recent day, soldiers swam in warm waters that were clear enough to spot a sunken Russian armored vehicle.
The major battle in this part of the Black Sea is now being fought for several gas drilling rigs to the east of the island. Ukraine is fighting to expel Russian troops who have stationed equipment there to monitor Ukrainian forces and track missiles and drones that Kyiv is using to target the occupied Crimean Peninsula.
Timur Special Unit recently sent around a dozen speedboats to attack the rigs, peppering them with machine-gun fire and shooting down a Su-30SM, a modern Russian jet fighter, before withdrawing.
Cargo ships seen from the port of Odesa sail off the coast of Ukraine.
Write to James Marson at james.marson@wsj.com
2. In the Shadow of War: The Promise and Peril of Covert Action
What if we did not conduct any covert action? Would that somehow make us more secure?
Has a war ever started in response to covert action - e.g., has a nation ever gone to war with a country because that county conducted a covert action against it?
Excerpts:
Looking beyond the Middle East, there are greater global security issues at stake in the future of covert action. Even if it only offers “implausible deniability” today, states around the world are still embracing covert action and the ambiguity it creates because it complicates how the other side reacts. A military response that triggers a major war would be an especially dangerous development in the emerging era of great power competition between the United States and China, much of which is taking place in the shadows.
“Blowback” is an old CIA term for the unintended and undesired consequences of covert action. Recent reports have suggested that Israel was waiting to detonate the devices in the event of a war but decided to launch the operation because there were indications Hezbollah was about to discover the plot. Hezbollah may now feel forced to respond in a way that leads to the regional war that all sides have avoided so far. Some commentators are also speculating that the operation could be a prelude to a larger Israeli military campaign against Hezbollah, which may be inevitable anyway. Depending on what happens next, the region could very well suffer blowback—and the rest of the world along with it.
In the Shadow of War: The Promise and Peril of Covert Action
The recent explosions targeting Hezbollah illustrate the growing appeal of covert action in an age of great power competition.
The National Interest · by Jeff Rogg · September 20, 2024
The world just witnessed one of the most remarkable intelligence operations in history. A flood of reports have claimed that Israel sabotaged pagers used by the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah and detonated them simultaneously, killing several and wounding hundreds or even thousands of its operatives. Hezbollah has vowed retaliation, but the sophisticated nature of the attack and its effects on Hezbollah’s communications, command and control, and morale have severely shaken the organization. Quickly lost in the accusations, threats, and uncertainty following the operation is the fact that Israel has not officially claimed responsibility for it. That is because it falls under a special, secret category of statecraft known as covert action.
Covert action is an operation in which the role of the sponsor is supposed to remain hidden or unacknowledged. Put another way, it creates “plausible deniability,” which allows governments to deny their knowledge of—or participation in—covert operations. States typically employ covert action in situations where they cannot accomplish their goals through overt measures or where the risk of taking credit for an operation is too great. Covert action is especially valuable when states conduct operations that could otherwise be seen as acts of war, such as deadly attacks within the sovereign borders of another state.
This latest covert operation follows another recent one targeting Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran in July. According to reports, Haniyeh and his bodyguard were killed by an explosive device hidden in his room in a heavily guarded guesthouse run by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Suspicion immediately fell on Israel, which has a long history of targeted killings. Humiliated by such an enormous intelligence failure, Iran promised to retaliate. Defying expert predictions that it would strike Israel directly within days, Iran has seemingly backed off. It has hinted that its revenge will be “different” and not necessarily the large military operation that everyone feared would result in a regional war.
All this after Israel allegedly killed several IRGC officers, who were themselves involved in covert operations, in a strike against an Iranian consulate in Damascus in April. Iran responded by launching a massive salvo of drones, missiles, and rockets at Israel that did minimal damage thanks to the efforts of the United States, Israel, and several Arab states. It was the first direct military attack in what had previously been a shadow war that Iran and Israel have been waging for decades.
It was particularly ironic and even irrational that Iran would respond directly to an unacknowledged Israeli attack with overt military force. After all, Iran has largely attained its current position of power in the Middle East by working covertly through proxies. And while Iran has suffered losses in the form of other targeted killings and mysterious explosions targeting its nuclear and weapons facilities that it has attributed to Israel, it has escaped the crippling effects of a war with Israel precisely because it has availed itself of covert action.
Following the latest covert operation against Hezbollah, the world is again waiting in suspense, fearing the outbreak of a bloody regional war. Like Iran, Hezbollah will have to carefully consider its options if it wants to avoid a war that would undoubtedly devastate it and destroy Lebanon. But, beyond the fact that a large, overt attack in response to covert action would be against both Iran’s and Hezbollah’s interests, it would also represent a grave breach of an unpleasant, yet practical, custom in international relations.
Covert action was a key feature of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. The spectrum of covert operations ran from propaganda and electioneering to paramilitary operations and assassinations. Critically, covert action allowed the two belligerents to compete without resorting to a catastrophic war. It offers the same escape clause today.
Of course, there are always risks associated with covert action. One side will often respond to another’s covert operations with its own, leading to an escalatory shadow war like the one that is currently playing out in the Middle East. Furthermore, technology, leaks, and open-source intelligence have made it more difficult to hide the hand of the actor who conducts a covert operation, so it is easier to assign blame. But blame is not the same thing as proof or an admission of responsibility, and as thin as this defense may sound, the world must weigh the consequences of abandoning covert action norms.
For starters, it is certainly not in America’s interest. Covert action was enshrined in U.S. law following decades of debate and is an indispensable instrument in U.S. national security policy. The U.S. government has conducted its own covert, targeted killing campaign in countries with which it is not at war. In fact, one of the most famous—and least covert—of these operations was the killing of Osama bin Laden. Moreover, the United States has played a part in the ongoing shadow war in the Middle East by working with Israel to conduct covert operations targeting Iran and Hezbollah. For the Biden administration, Israeli covert action, while provocative, is politically preferable to a regional war, which it has worked tirelessly to prevent.
Looking beyond the Middle East, there are greater global security issues at stake in the future of covert action. Even if it only offers “implausible deniability” today, states around the world are still embracing covert action and the ambiguity it creates because it complicates how the other side reacts. A military response that triggers a major war would be an especially dangerous development in the emerging era of great power competition between the United States and China, much of which is taking place in the shadows.
“Blowback” is an old CIA term for the unintended and undesired consequences of covert action. Recent reports have suggested that Israel was waiting to detonate the devices in the event of a war but decided to launch the operation because there were indications Hezbollah was about to discover the plot. Hezbollah may now feel forced to respond in a way that leads to the regional war that all sides have avoided so far. Some commentators are also speculating that the operation could be a prelude to a larger Israeli military campaign against Hezbollah, which may be inevitable anyway. Depending on what happens next, the region could very well suffer blowback—and the rest of the world along with it.
Jeff Rogg is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of South Florida’s Global and National Security Institute. He also sits on the boards of the International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence and the Society for Intelligence History. His book, The Spy and the State: The History of American Intelligence is forthcoming with Oxford University Press in May 2025.
Image: getmilitaryphotos / Shutterstock.com.
The National Interest · by Jeff Rogg · September 20, 2024
3. Back to the Cold War: Russia uses Mexico as a hub for spying on the U.S.
Excerpts:
The Russians likely would have little interest in having operatives try to cross the southern border illegally with migrants, London said. “They want any travel to be aboveboard, look clean, to be unnoticeable,” he said.
But Russian intelligence agencies would have the option to work with cross-border criminal networks if it suited a particular mission, and if they were ready to tolerate a much higher risk, according to other former intelligence officers.
Part of the mandate of the GRU is to prepare possible sabotage operations in the event of a war with the U.S., and Mexico would be a practical base for such contingency plans, former intelligence officers said.
The perception of a large Russian spying bastion in Mexico is useful as a propaganda tool as well, to exaggerate Moscow’s capabilities and fuel a perception of a supposedly “uncontrollable border,” Kolbe said.
U.S. officials also are concerned about Russia’s effort to manipulate the information landscape in Mexico, seeking not only to undercut international support for Ukraine but also to sow social divisions. Russia has expanded its state-funded media outlet RT in Mexico and run a large advertising campaign for the channel.
In April, the Russian ambassador to Mexico posted a false report by Russian state media claiming that the U.S. was recruiting members of drug cartels from Mexico and Colombia to send them to fight in Ukraine. The baseless account was picked up by some Mexican news organizations.
Back to the Cold War: Russia uses Mexico as a hub for spying on the U.S.
Russia has a long history of spying on the U.S. from the relative safety of Mexico City, dating back to the 1980s. Decades before that, Stalin had his chief rival assassinated there.
NBC News · by Dan De Luce and Owen Hayes
Russian intelligence services are building up their presence in Mexico for spy operations targeting the United States, a return to Cold War tactics by an increasingly aggressive regime, according to U.S. officials and former intelligence officers.
Russia has added dozens of personnel to its embassy staff in Mexico City in the past few years, even though Moscow has only limited trade ties with the country. U.S. officials say the trend is concerning and believe the extensive buildup is aimed at bolstering the Kremlin’s intelligence operations targeting the U.S., as well as its propaganda efforts aimed at undermining Washington and Ukraine.
The Biden administration has raised the issue with the Mexican government, a U.S. official told NBC News. “Russia has really invested in Mexico in terms of seeking to extend their presence,” the official said.
The Mexican Embassy and the Russian Embassy did not respond to a request for comment.
CIA Director William Burns said earlier this month his agency and the U.S. government are “sharply focused” on Russia’s expanding footprint in Mexico, which he said was partly the result of Russian spies being expelled from foreign capitals after Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
“Part of this is a function of the fact that so many Russian intelligence officers have been kicked out of Europe. … So they’re looking for places to go and looking for places in which they can operate,” Burns said in London this month when asked about suspected Russian spying out of Mexico. “But we’re very sharply focused on that.”
Russia’s actions in Mexico reflect a more aggressive posture by its intelligence services across multiple fronts, as the Kremlin seeks to silence critics abroad, undermine support for Ukraine and weaken Western democracies, former intelligence officials said. That approach has included sabotage and attempted sabotage in Europe, assassination plots, relentless cyberattacks and large-scale global disinformation campaigns, according to U.S. and European officials.
A view of destroyed building following Russian bombing in Pokrovsk, Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine, on Sept. 13.Vincenzo Circosta / Anadolu via Getty Images
“They’re willing to take much higher risks now than maybe they would have in the immediate post-Cold War,” said Paul Kolbe, who worked for 25 years as an operations officer in the CIA, with postings in Russia, the Balkans and elsewhere.
Air Force Gen. Glen VanHerck, head of U.S. Northern Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee in March 2022 that Russia’s GRU military intelligence service had a massive presence in Mexico.
“I would point out that the largest portion of GRU members in the world is in Mexico right now. Those are Russian intelligence personnel, and they keep an eye very closely on their opportunities to have influence on U.S. opportunities and access,” VanHerck said.
Since VanHerck’s comments, which came shortly after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia has continued to expand its footprint at the embassy in Mexico City, securing accreditation from the Mexican authorities.
Asked about the general’s comments at the time, Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said he didn’t have information about it and that Mexico is “a free, independent, sovereign country.”
Even though Mexico has built up extensive trade ties with the United States over decades, it has traditionally tried to steer away from fully aligning itself with Washington’s foreign policy and has maintained friendly relations with Russia and Cuba.
Russian spies — and their American informants — have a long history in Mexico.
In 1940, the Kremlin hunted down one of its revolutionary leaders and communist ideologues, Leon Trotsky, who had been ousted from power after falling out with Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.
Trotsky, who at one point was expected to succeed Vladimir Lenin as leader of the Soviet Union, had lived in hiding, moving from country to country before settling in Mexico.
But on Aug. 20, 1940, Trotsky allowed a Spanish communist he believed was a friend into his private study. The visitor, Ramon Mercader, had hidden a shortened ice climbing ax under his suit jacket, suspended by a string. He attacked Trotsky, who died from his wounds the following day.
John Sipher, who worked in the CIA’s clandestine service for 28 years, said Russia has always told Americans offering to spy for Moscow to head to Mexico.
“For decades, if Americans reached out and volunteered to spy for Moscow, they would be told to travel to Mexico City. The environment for Russian intelligence in the U.S. is difficult,” Sipher said.
In the 1970s, Christopher Boyce, a college student working at the TRW aerospace company in the affluent suburbs of Los Angeles, and his high school friend Andrew Daulton Lee, were found guilty of providing U.S. satellite secrets to the Soviets. Over two years, Lee traveled to Mexico City to deliver classified information to agents at the Soviet Embassy and collect money for him and Boyce. Their case became the subject of a book and a major Hollywood film, “The Falcon and the Snowman.”
Federal marshals escort captured fugitive Christopher Boyce in manacles from Seattle in 1981. Bettmann Archive via Getty Images
Harold “Jim” Nicholson, a high-ranking CIA officer convicted in 1997 of passing secrets to Moscow, was serving his sentence for espionage when he tried to use his son to collect his “pension” payments from Russian agents in Mexico. His son was eventually arrested and convicted in 2010, and his father was convicted for a second time.
Two years ago, a prominent Mexican scientist, Hector Cabrera Fuentes, pleaded guilty to being co-opted by Russian agents into surveilling a U.S. government informant living in Miami. Fuentes was leading a double life with two families on two continents, and Russian spies used that to coerce Fuentes into cooperating.
Unlike the U.S., where Russian intelligence is under intense scrutiny from the FBI and consulates have been shuttered, Mexico offers a convenient, lower-risk setting for Moscow to oversee agents in the U.S. and stage other operations, according to former intelligence officers.
“It’s a very benign environment for the Russians to operate in,” said Douglas London, a retired senior CIA operations officer and the author of a memoir, “The Recruiter.” “It makes a lot of sense, and it’s why the Russians are there in such big numbers.”
The Russians would likely want to use Mexico’s proximity but relative safety beyond U.S. law enforcement’s reach to support both American agents and Russian officers operating under “deep cover” in the U.S., he said.
An American agent working for Russian intelligence could travel back and forth across the U.S.-Mexico border and meet up with Russian handlers to get paid, debriefed, resupplied and receive training on communication methods or other spycraft, London and other former CIA officers said.
Russian intelligence could conceivably also take advantage of Mexico’s proximity to target Putin’s political enemies inside the U.S., former intelligence officers said.
View of the grave of Leon Trotsky, one of the leaders of the Russian Revolution, and his wife wife Natalia Sedova's at the garden of their House Museum in Mexico City in 2020.Claudio Cruz / AFP via Getty Images file
The Russians likely would have little interest in having operatives try to cross the southern border illegally with migrants, London said. “They want any travel to be aboveboard, look clean, to be unnoticeable,” he said.
But Russian intelligence agencies would have the option to work with cross-border criminal networks if it suited a particular mission, and if they were ready to tolerate a much higher risk, according to other former intelligence officers.
Part of the mandate of the GRU is to prepare possible sabotage operations in the event of a war with the U.S., and Mexico would be a practical base for such contingency plans, former intelligence officers said.
The perception of a large Russian spying bastion in Mexico is useful as a propaganda tool as well, to exaggerate Moscow’s capabilities and fuel a perception of a supposedly “uncontrollable border,” Kolbe said.
U.S. officials also are concerned about Russia’s effort to manipulate the information landscape in Mexico, seeking not only to undercut international support for Ukraine but also to sow social divisions. Russia has expanded its state-funded media outlet RT in Mexico and run a large advertising campaign for the channel.
In April, the Russian ambassador to Mexico posted a false report by Russian state media claiming that the U.S. was recruiting members of drug cartels from Mexico and Colombia to send them to fight in Ukraine. The baseless account was picked up by some Mexican news organizations.
Dan De Luce
Dan De Luce is a reporter for the NBC News Investigative Unit.
Owen Hayes
Owen Hayes is an associate producer for the NBC News Washington bureau.
NBC News · by Dan De Luce and Owen Hayes
4. Biden hosts his final Quad summit at his Delaware home, high school
Excerpts:
The Biden administration promised that the leaders would issue a joint statement containing the strongest-ever language on China and North Korea to be agreed upon by the four countries.
The leaders Saturday also rolled out a new collaboration aimed at reducing cervical cancer in the Indo-Pacific. The new partnership is related to Biden's Cancer Moonshot Initiative, a long-running passion project of the president and his wife, first lady Jill Biden, aimed at reducing cancer deaths. The Bidens' son Beau died in 2015 at age 46 of brain cancer.
As Mr. Biden's time in office draws down, the White House also was celebrating the bipartisan, bicameral formation of a "Quad Caucus" in Congress meant to ensure the longevity of the partnership regardless of the outcome of the November election.
Biden hosts his final Quad summit at his Delaware home, high school
CBS News
President Biden showed off a slice of his Delaware hometown of Wilmington to the leaders of Australia, Japan and India as he hosted what is likely the last gathering of the Indo-Pacific partnership that has grown in prominence under his White House tenure.
When Mr. Biden began his presidency he looked to elevate the so-called Quad, which until then had only met at the foreign minister level, to a leader-level partnership as he tried to pivot U.S. foreign policy away from conflicts in the Middle East and toward threats and opportunities in the Indo-Pacific. This weekend's summit is the fourth in-person and sixth overall gathering of the leaders since 2021.
"It will survive way beyond November," Mr. Biden declared as the leaders gathered at the Archmere Academy, his high school alma mater in nearby Claymont for joint talks.
Following their meeting, the four leaders released a joint statement they titled the "Wilmington Declaration," which seeks to "reaffirm our steadfast commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific that is inclusive and resilient."
The extensive resolution, described as a "vision statement," touched on a variety of issues including regional conflicts, including the Israel-Hamas war and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, maritime security, technology, clean energy, cyber security and health.
President Biden (C) meets with (L-R, at table) Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken during the so-called Quad summit at the Archmere Academy in Wilmington, Delaware, on Sept. 21, 2024. BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images
Biden hosts leaders at his Wilmington home and high school alma mater
The president, who has admitted to an uneven track record as a scholar, also seemed tickled to get to host a gathering with three world leaders at the school he attended more than 60 years ago. He welcomed each of the leaders individually for one-on-one talks at his nearby home before they gathered at the school for talks and a formal dinner.
"I don't think the headmaster of this school thought I'd be presiding over a meeting like this," Mr. Biden joked to fellow leaders.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida came for the summit before their appearances at the U.N. General Assembly in New York next week.
"This place could not be better suited for my final visit as prime minister," said Kishida, who like Mr. Biden, is set to soon leave office.
Earlier, the president warmly greeted Kishida when he arrived at the residence on Saturday morning and gave the prime minister a tour of the property before they settled into talks. Kishida, according to the prime minister's office, thanked Biden at the outset of their meeting for inviting him to meet at his home.
White House officials said holding the talks at the president's house, which sits near a pond in a wooded area several miles west of downtown, was intended to give the meetings a more relaxed feel.
White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan described the vibe of Mr. Biden's one-on-one meeting with Albanese, who stopped by the house on Friday, as "two guys — one at the other guy's home — talking in broad strokes about where they see the state of the world." He said Mr. Biden and Albanese also swapped stories about their political careers.
The Australian leader remarked that the visit had given him "insight into what in my view makes you such an extraordinary world leader."
Modi also stopped by the house on Saturday to meet with Mr. Biden before the leaders gathered for their joint talks at Archmere.
"There cannot be a better place than President Biden's hometown of Wilmington to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Quad," Modi said.
Reporters and photographers were prohibited from covering Mr. Biden's individual meetings with the leaders, and Biden does not plan to do a news conference — a question-and-answer appearance that is typical at such international summits.
What Biden hopes to accomplish with the summit
As part of the summit, the leaders announced new initiatives to bolster maritime security in the region — with enhanced coast guard collaboration through the Pacific and Indian oceans — and improved cooperation on humanitarian response missions. The measures are meant to serve as a counterweight to an increasingly assertive China.
"We are seriously concerned about the situation in the East and South China Seas," the Wilmington Declaration read. "We continue to express our serious concern about the militarization of disputed features, and coercive and intimidating maneuvers in the South China Sea."
Mr. Biden and Modi had been expected to discuss Modi's recent visits to Russia and Ukraine as well as economic and security concerns about China. Modi is the most prominent leader from a nation that maintains a neutral position on Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
The Wilmington Declaration noted that all four leaders have visited Ukraine since the war there began and reiterated "the need for a comprehensive, just, and lasting peace in line with international law, consistent with the purposes and principles of the UN Charter, including respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity."
Sullivan said "that countries like India should step up and support the principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity" and that "every country, everywhere, should refrain from supplying inputs to Russia's war machine."
The gathering was also an opportunity for Mr. Biden and Japan's Kishida to bid each other farewell.
Mr. Biden and Kishida, who are both stepping away from office amid sliding public support, count the tightening of security and economic ties among the U.S., Japan and South Korea as one of their most significant accomplishments. The two leaders sat down for their wide-ranging, one-on-one conversation on Saturday morning.
The improved relations between Japan and South Korea, two nations with a deep and complicated history that have struggled to stay on speaking terms, have come amid worrying developments in the Pacific, including strides made by North Korea in its nuclear program and increasing Chinese assertiveness.
The Wilmington Declaration condemned "North Korea's destabilizing ballistic missile launches and its continued pursuit of nuclear weapons in violation of multiple UN Security Council resolutions," adding that its "launches pose a grave threat to international peace and stability."
Mr. Biden commended Kishida for demonstrating "courage and conviction in strengthening ties" with South Korea, according to the White House. They also discussed China's "coercive and destabilizing activities" in the Pacific, Russia's war against Ukraine and emerging technology issues.
On the Israel-Hamas war, the Wilmington Declaration affirmed "the imperative of securing the release of all hostages held by Hamas" in a deal that "would bring an immediate and prolonged ceasefire in Gaza."
The declaration also called for "significantly increase deliveries of life-saving humanitarian assistance throughout Gaza as well as the crucial need to prevent regional escalation."
Tension surrounds Nippon Steel's proposed acquisition of U.S. Steel
The U.S. and Japan are negotiating through a rare moment of tension in the relationship. Mr. Biden, as well as Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, the two candidates in the 2024 presidential election, have opposed a $15 billion bid by Japan's Nippon Steel to take over American-owned U.S. Steel.
Biden administration officials indicated this week that a U.S. government committee's formal assessment of the proposed deal has yet to be submitted to the White House and may not come until after the Nov. 5 election.
Sullivan pushed back against speculation that the expected timing of the report could suggest Mr. Biden is having second thoughts about his opposition to the deal.
The Biden administration promised that the leaders would issue a joint statement containing the strongest-ever language on China and North Korea to be agreed upon by the four countries.
The leaders Saturday also rolled out a new collaboration aimed at reducing cervical cancer in the Indo-Pacific. The new partnership is related to Biden's Cancer Moonshot Initiative, a long-running passion project of the president and his wife, first lady Jill Biden, aimed at reducing cancer deaths. The Bidens' son Beau died in 2015 at age 46 of brain cancer.
As Mr. Biden's time in office draws down, the White House also was celebrating the bipartisan, bicameral formation of a "Quad Caucus" in Congress meant to ensure the longevity of the partnership regardless of the outcome of the November election.
CBS News
5. Did Shohei Ohtani just play the single greatest baseball game ever?
Wow. What a player. 6 for 6 and 10 RBIs and 2 stolen bases.
Excerpts:
And had Ohtani not gotten thrown out trying to leg out a triple in his third at-bat, he’d have added his second career cycle, too.
No player in baseball history had hit three homers and stolen multiple bases in a game, until Ohtani did it on Thursday. No player had collected more total bases (17) in a multi-steal game, smashing the previous mark of 11 from the likes of Kirk Gibson and Braggo Roth. No player since at least 1901 had collected at least five hits, hit multiple home runs and stolen multiple bases in the same game.
According to OptaSTATS, no player since 1920 has ever had a 10-RBI day, a six-hit day, a five extra-base hit day, a three-homer day, and a multi-steal day within their career. Ohtani crammed all that production into a single Thursday afternoon during a 20-4 thrashing of the Marlins.
Did Shohei Ohtani just play the single greatest baseball game ever?
https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/5781376/2024/09/20/shohei-ohtani-dodgers-best-game-ever/
By Fabian Ardaya
Sep 20, 2024
591
MIAMI – The Veuve Clicquot had been poured and the commemorative T-shirts handed out. Only then, once there had been time for it all to sink in, could his awestruck teammates fully comprehend the latest demonstration of greatness by Shohei Ohtani.
They marveled not only at his latest milestone, becoming the first player to hit 50 homers and steal 50 bases in the same season. But they spoke with admiration about the way Ohtani reached the 50-50 club — with a single-game performance for the ages.
“That has to be the greatest baseball game of all time,” Gavin Lux said. “It has to be.”
Ohtani singlehandedly pummeled the Miami Marlins on Thursday. He went 6-for-6, slugged three home runs, drove in 10 runs and swiped two bases — in a game that clinched a postseason berth.
“I didn’t even realize he was 6-for-6,” Mookie Betts said. “What we see is like expected. It’s crazy that he lives up to those types of expectations. But that’s also what makes you speechless.”
And had Ohtani not gotten thrown out trying to leg out a triple in his third at-bat, he’d have added his second career cycle, too.
No player in baseball history had hit three homers and stolen multiple bases in a game, until Ohtani did it on Thursday. No player had collected more total bases (17) in a multi-steal game, smashing the previous mark of 11 from the likes of Kirk Gibson and Braggo Roth. No player since at least 1901 had collected at least five hits, hit multiple home runs and stolen multiple bases in the same game.
According to OptaSTATS, no player since 1920 has ever had a 10-RBI day, a six-hit day, a five extra-base hit day, a three-homer day, and a multi-steal day within their career. Ohtani crammed all that production into a single Thursday afternoon during a 20-4 thrashing of the Marlins.
So, how did Ohtani’s masterclass rank with the other greatest individual offensive performances of all-time? With so many worthy contenders, it might depend on the parameters.
Best 6-for-6 days ever?
Few can speak with more authority on this subject than Dodgers manager Dave Roberts. On May 23, 2002, in a game against the Milwaukee Brewers, Roberts watched from the Dodgers dugout as teammate Shawn Green slugged four home runs, part of a 6-for-6 day.
“Sorry, Shawn,” Roberts said after Ohtani’s outburst, again from the Dodgers dugout. “But just in totality I don’t know that I’ve seen anything like this.”
Green’s 19 total bases remain an all-time single-game record. Anthony Rendon (April 30, 2017), Edgardo Alfonso (Aug. 30, 1999), Jimmie Foxx (July 10, 1932) and Ty Cobb (May 5, 1925) all enjoyed 6-for-6 games – though with fewer total bases than both Green and Ohtani.
Shawn Green blasts his fourth home run on May 23, 2002. (Tannen Maury/AFP via Getty Images)
What about by RBIs?
While Ohtani’s 10 RBIs against the Marlins were impressive, a few other players have him beat by this measure. Though not by much.
Mark Whiten hit four home runs and drove in 12 on Sept. 7, 1993. It is one of four games ever with more than 10 RBIs from one player, matching Jim Bottomley’s 6-for-6, 12-RBI game from Sept. 16, 1924. The only other players who drove in more runs (11) in a game than Ohtani did on Thursday are Phil Weintraub (April 30, 1944) and Tony Lazerri (May 24, 1936).
Of course, Ohtani has that group bested in one way. None of those games featured multiple stolen bases.
Mark Whiten in 1993. (George Gojkovich / Getty Images)
Best game ever by a designated hitter?
This title, far and away, belongs to Ohtani. Since the American League introduced the DH in 1973, only two players have collected six hits while occupying that spot. The first was Kevin Reimer on Aug. 24, 1993 against Oakland. The second was Ohtani. Despite a job description that calls for total focus on offense, no DH had ever logged double-digit runs batted in or collected more than 15 total bases in a game.
“Take the season out of it – today was probably the single best offensive game I’ve ever seen,” Max Muncy said.
What about all-around games?
If individual dominance is the measure, a few pitching performances could rise to the level of best game ever. Think Kerry Wood’s 20-strikeout game, Sandy Koufax’s 14-strikeout perfect game, or Max Scherzer’s 17-strikeout no-hitter.
Jim Tobin once threw a complete game on the mound while hitting three home runs at the plate (though he did allow five runs that day). Rick Wise threw a no-hitter on June 23, 1971 – and slugged two home runs himself.
Of course, Ohtani knows something about dominant two-way performances. In a June 27, 2023 start against the White Sox, he struck out 10 while allowing one run in 6 ⅓ innings, all while smacking two home runs and going 3-for-4 at the plate.
But even that performance might pale in comparison to what Ohtani authored during Thursday’s display of dominance.
“I’ve never seen anybody do that even in little leagues,” Lux said. “So it’s crazy that he’s doing that at the highest level.”
(Top photo of Shohei Ohtani ripping a double: Chris Arjoon / Getty Images)
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Fabian Ardaya is a staff writer covering the Los Angeles Dodgers for The Athletic. He previously spent three seasons covering the crosstown Los Angeles Angels for The Athletic. He graduated from Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication in May 2017 after growing up in a Phoenix-area suburb. Follow Fabian on Twitter @FabianArdaya
6. The National Guard is in the crosshairs. Congress can save it
Excerpts:
Congress is poised to adopt language in the annual National Defense Authorization Act that would override governors’ authority over National Guard units. Adoption would seriously damage our national security, imperil military readiness, and infringe upon longstanding gubernatorial authority over National Guard units.
The good news is Congress has an opportunity to change course.
Earlier this year, the Department of the Air Force submitted Legislative Proposal 480, which aims to circumvent federal law requiring governors to consent to any transfer of National Guard units out of their respective states.
The end goal is to take Air National Guard units performing space missions out of their states and forcibly integrate them into the U.S. Space Force. This override of established federal law raised serious concerns within the National Guard community and united the nation’s 55 state and territorial governors in opposition to it.
...
We urge the Senate to adopt the House version of the NDAA which maintains the governors’ authorities in accordance with longstanding law and also allows for the transfer of the units.
The National Guard is in the crosshairs. Congress can save it
By Army National Guard Maj. Gen. Frank McGinn (ret.)
Sep 21, 2024, 08:01 AM
militarytimes.com · by Army National Guard Maj. Gen. Frank McGinn (ret.) · September 21, 2024
For nearly 400 years, the National Guard has been America’s protectors on the home front. But the existence of the National Guard as we know it is now being seriously challenged.
Congress is poised to adopt language in the annual National Defense Authorization Act that would override governors’ authority over National Guard units. Adoption would seriously damage our national security, imperil military readiness, and infringe upon longstanding gubernatorial authority over National Guard units.
The good news is Congress has an opportunity to change course.
Earlier this year, the Department of the Air Force submitted Legislative Proposal 480, which aims to circumvent federal law requiring governors to consent to any transfer of National Guard units out of their respective states.
The end goal is to take Air National Guard units performing space missions out of their states and forcibly integrate them into the U.S. Space Force. This override of established federal law raised serious concerns within the National Guard community and united the nation’s 55 state and territorial governors in opposition to it.
The governors’ position is noteworthy.
It is rare that leaders of contrasting regional, political, and geographical constituencies find common ground on an issue. Their April statement against LP480 is focused on the potential impact on more than 450,000 Army and Air Guardsmen.
We share the view of the governors that LP480 “disregards gubernatorial authorities regarding the National Guard and undermines over 100 years of precedent as well as national security and military readiness.”
Over the last century, units have moved from one state to another. Or, as happened after World War II, units were dissolved. However, in every case, those actions were taken with the consent of the affected governors as required by law. In all our discussions with proponents of LP480, we’ve yet to receive an explanation as to why the law should no longer apply.
The National Guard Association of the United States, along with our partners, spent the last six months trying to find a solution to the LP480 problem. We have attempted to work directly with the Department of the Air Force to find a mutually beneficial arrangement that would not erode decades of federal law and create a capability gap in our national security infrastructure. We have also informed Congress on the potential detrimental effects that LP480 would have on our national security, including data which shows most affected airmen will not join the Space Force. The loss of these highly trained professionals would be immense.
New Jersey National Guard troops arrive near the Capitol to set up security positions in Washington, D.C., Jan. 12, 2021. (U.S. Air National Guard)
The concern about precedent is not irrational. Currently, the Air Force is developing its cyber capabilities, in part, relying on a new Air National Guard unit. The Army Guard has the 91st Cyber Brigade with units in more than 30 states.
If LP480 is approved, the path for the federal government to avoid obtaining governors’ consent is open. What could come next? How would we prevent moving a C-130 wing out of a state and putting it into the active component? Or taking a brigade combat team out of the Army Guard and putting that into the active component?
Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall stated this is a “unique situation,” a one-off. Will the next secretary agree? Or another service chief? Readiness and force cohesion undoubtedly would suffer.
Furthermore, if those Airmen are moved into the Space Force, they lose access to State Partnership Program to support USSPACECOM/USSF priority security cooperation requirements.
At times, we have come close to reaching a compromise where there is a give and take on both sides of the disagreement. However, the intransigence and stubbornness of unelected Pentagon policymakers has prevented an amicable agreement from being reached. The good news is Congress has an opportunity to solve the problem with a consensus solution.
U.S., Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., courageously led efforts to amend the House version of the NDAA, addressing the concerns of the governors and Guard community. This language preserves the authority of governors while also providing a potential pathway for a voluntary transfer of the Guard units in question. Most importantly, it will prevent any capability gaps in our national security infrastructure. Should both chambers of Congress adopt the House language in the final version of the bill, the problem will solve itself and take one of many tasks off the Congressional to-do list.
In addition to following the law and ensuring national security, Congress should also take note that the next presidential administration may not be in favor of LP480. Vice Presidential candidate Gov. Tim Walz is an opponent of LP480 and signed the letter against it earlier this year.
KC-135 Stratotankers from the Alaska Air National Guard's 168th Wing line up in -10° weather for a "polar bear" formation at Eielson Air Force Base, Alaska, Dec 2, 2023. (Senior Master Sgt. Julie Avey/Air National Guard)
While Vice President Kamala Harris has not weighed in, it would be unwise for Congress to move forward with LP480 in its present form less than two months from election day. Additionally, former President Donald Trump is a supporter of establishing a Space National Guard – something which would be practically impossible should LP480 be adopted as currently written. We can all agree the next commander in chief should not be prevented from pursuing their vision for the armed forces before they are even sworn into office.
Secretary Kendall told The War Horse in a late May interview that the Air Force “can live with any result that comes out” of the debate over LP480. He added that if the Airmen with space missions “stay in the Air Guard, we’ll make that work.” Given an increasing reliance upon the Guard at home and abroad, we need to find a solution that recognizes the National Guard is an asset to our national security, not an impediment. Our soldiers and airmen continue to answer the nation’s call, just as they have done for centuries.
We urge the Senate to adopt the House version of the NDAA which maintains the governors’ authorities in accordance with longstanding law and also allows for the transfer of the units.
Frank McGinn is a retired Massachusetts Army National Guard major general and the president of the National Guard Association of the United States.
7. How a U.S. Ally Uses Aid as a Cover in War
How a U.S. Ally Uses Aid as a Cover in War
The United Arab Emirates is expanding a covert campaign to back a winner in Sudan’s civil war. Waving the banner of the Red Crescent, it is also smuggling weapons and deploying drones.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/21/world/africa/uae-sudan-civil-war.html?cbgrp=p&ngrp=mnp&pvid=5690F29F-3CB1-45F7-8C12-F3532579C1F0&referringSource=
Covert drone airbase
30 miles from Sudan
Drone hangars and
control system
Red Crescent
hospital
Satellite image by Airbus DS, 2024By The New York Times
By Declan Walsh and Christoph Koettl
Declan Walsh reported from Sudan, Chad and Switzerland. Christoph Koettl analyzed satellite images, flight records and other materials.
Sept. 21, 2024
The drones soar over the vast deserts along the Sudanese border, guiding weapons convoys that smuggle illicit arms to fighters accused of widespread atrocities and ethnic cleansing.
They hover over a besieged city at the center of Sudan’s terrible famine, supporting a ruthless paramilitary force that has bombed hospitals, looted food shipments and torched thousands of homes, aid groups say.
Yet the drones are flying out of a base where the United Arab Emirates says it is running a humanitarian effort for the Sudanese people — part of what it calls its “urgent priority” to save innocent lives and stave off starvation in Africa’s largest war.
The Emirates is playing a deadly double game in Sudan, a country shredded by one of the world’s most catastrophic civil wars.
Eager to cement its role as a regional kingmaker, the wealthy Persian Gulf petrostate is expanding its covert campaign to back a winner in Sudan, funneling money, weapons and, now, powerful drones to fighters rampaging across the country, according to officials, internal diplomatic memos and satellite images analyzed by The New York Times.
All the while, the Emirates is presenting itself as a champion of peace, diplomacy and international aid. It is even using one of the world’s most famous relief symbols — the Red Crescent, the counterpart of the Red Cross — as a cover for its secret operation to fly drones into Sudan and smuggle weapons to fighters, satellite images show and American officials say.
The war in Sudan, a sprawling gold-rich nation with nearly 500 miles of Red Sea coastline, has been fueled by a plethora of foreign nations, like Iran and Russia. They are supplying arms to the warring sides, hoping to tilt the scales for profit or their own strategic gain — while the people of Sudan are caught in the crossfire.
But the Emirates is playing the largest and most consequential role of all, officials say, publicly pledging to ease Sudan’s suffering even as it secretly inflames it.
Image
Recently arrived Sudanese refugees from the Darfur region, in line to receive food on the outskirts of Adré, a town in eastern Chad, in July.Credit...Ivor Prickett for The New York Times
Starvation haunts Sudan. Famine was officially declared last month after nearly 18 months of fighting, which has killed tens of thousands and scattered at least 10 million people in the world’s worst displacement crisis, the United Nations says. Aid groups call it a calamity of “historic proportions.”
The Emirates says it has made “absolutely clear” that it is not arming or supporting “any of the warring parties” in Sudan. To the contrary, it says, it is “alarmed by the rapidly accelerating humanitarian catastrophe” and pushing for an “immediate cease-fire.”
But for more than a year, the Emirates has been secretly bolstering the Rapid Support Forces, or R.S.F., the paramilitary group fighting Sudan’s military for control of Africa’s third-largest country.
Map shows areas of conflict in Sudan.
Sudan
Chad
Detail area
Nile
Amdjarass
U.A.E. hospital
and drone system
Khartoum
Capital and
main focus
of fighting
El Fasher
Under siege
by R.S.F.
Blue
Nile
Darfur
Region
White Nile
100 miles
By The New York Times
A Times investigation last year detailing the Emirati weapons smuggling operation was confirmed by U.N. investigators in January, when they cited “credible” evidence that the Emirates was breaking a two-decade U.N. arms embargo in Sudan.
Now, the Emiratis are amplifying their covert campaign. Powerful Chinese-made drones, by far the largest deployed in Sudan’s war, are being flown from an airport across the border in Chad that the Emirates has expanded into a well-equipped, military-style airfield.
Hangars have been built and a drone control station installed, satellite images show. Many of the cargo planes that have landed at the airport during the war previously transported weapons for the Emirates to other conflict zones, like Libya, where the Emiratis have also been accused of breaching an arms embargo, a Times analysis of flight tracking data found.
American officials say the Emiratis are now using the airport to fly advanced military drones to provide the R.S.F. with battlefield intelligence, and to escort weapons shipments to fighters in Sudan — to keep an eye out for ambushes.
Through an analysis of satellite images, The Times identified the type of drone being used: the Wing Loong 2, a Chinese model often compared to the MQ-9 Reaper of the U.S. Air Force.
The images show an apparent munitions bunker at the airport and a Wing Loong ground control station beside the runway — only about 750 yards from an Emirati-run hospital that has treated wounded R.S.F. fighters.
Video
Airbus DS, 2023 via Skywatch (Before image). Airbus DS, 2024 (July image).CreditCredit...
The Wing Loong can fly for 32 hours, has a range of 1,000 miles and can carry up to a dozen missiles or bombs. So far, the drones do not seem to be conducting airstrikes of their own in Sudan, officials say, but are providing surveillance and identifying targets on chaotic battlefields.
Civil War in Sudan
Fighting between two military factions has thrown Sudan into chaos.
That makes them “a significant force multiplier,” said J. Michael Dahm, a senior fellow at the Virginia-based Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies.
After taking off from the base, the drones may in fact be piloted remotely from Emirati soil, experts and officials say. Recently, they have been detected patrolling the skies above the embattled Sudanese city of El Fasher, where people are starving and surrounded by the R.S.F. The city is home to nearly two million people, and fears are rising that the war is on the precipice of even more atrocities.
Image
Chinese-made Wing Loong drones on display at an air show in Dubai in 2019.Credit...Karim Sahib/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
American officials have been pressuring all the war’s combatants to stop the carnage.
Vice President Kamala Harris confronted the leader of the Emirates, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, over his country’s support of the R.S.F. when the two met in December, according to officials briefed on the exchange. President Biden called this week for an end to the “senseless war,” warning that the R.S.F.’s brutal, monthslong siege on El Fasher “has become a full-on assault.”
The crisis is expected to come up again when he and Ms. Harris host the Emirati leader at the White House for the first time on Monday.
“It’s got to stop,” John F. Kirby, a White House spokesman, said of the siege.
‘They Can’t Lie to Us Anymore’
Both sides in Sudan’s civil war have been accused of war crimes, including brutal assaults filmed by the fighters themselves.
The war erupted in 2023, when a power struggle between Sudan’s military and the R.S.F. — a fighting force it helped create — erupted into gunfire on the streets of the capital and quickly enveloped the nation.
Sudanese military planes have bombed civilians, while rights groups accuse the R.S.F. of ethnic cleansing and indiscriminate shelling that has destroyed hospitals, homes and aid warehouses.
In El Fasher, Doctors Without Borders has accused the military of bombing a children’s hospital, and R.S.F. troops of plundering food intended for a camp of 400,000 starving people.
Image
In Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, shells fired by the Rapid Support Forces blasted a hole in the Aliaa Specialist Hospital last April.Credit...Ivor Prickett for The New York Times
Aid workers are hoping to airdrop food into the city, which Toby Harward, the top U.N. official for Darfur, likened to “hell on earth.”
The Emirates insists it is simply trying to halt the war and help its victims. It has provided $230 million in aid and delivered 10,000 tons of relief supplies, and it played a prominent role in recent American-led peace talks in Switzerland.
“The U.A.E. remains committed to supporting the people of Sudan in restoring peace,” Lana Nusseibeh, an Emirati minister for foreign affairs, said afterward.
Senior American officials have privately tried to coax the Emirates to drop its covert operations, bluntly confronting it with American intelligence on what the Gulf state is doing inside Sudan, said five American officials with knowledge of the conversations.
After Vice President Harris raised American objections to the arms smuggling with Sheikh Mohammed in December, the Emirati leader offered what some officials considered a tacit acknowledgment.
Image
Vice President Kamala Harris and the leader of the Emirates, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, in Dubai in December. She confronted him over his country’s support of the R.S.F. during the meeting, officials said.Credit...UAE Presidential Court/EPA, via Shutterstock
While not admitting direct support to the R.S.F., Sheikh Mohammed said he owed the paramilitary group’s leader, Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan, for sending troops to fight alongside the Emirates in the war in Yemen, according to two American officials briefed on the exchange.
Sheikh Mohammed also said he viewed the R.S.F. as a bulwark against Islamist political movements in the region, which the Emirati royal family has long considered a threat to its authority, the officials said. (The Emirati government did not respond to questions about the conversation.)
“They can’t lie to us anymore, because they know that we know,” said one American official who, like others, was not authorized to speak publicly about the intelligence.
Relief organizations are particularly incensed with the Emirates, accusing it of running “a Potemkin aid operation” to disguise its support to the R.S.F., according to Jeremy Konyndyk, president of Refugees International and a former Obama and Biden administration official.
“They want it both ways,” he said of the Emiratis. “They want to act like a rogue, supporting their militia client and turning a blind eye to whatever they do with their weapons. And they want to appear like a constructive, rules-abiding member of the international system.”
Sudan’s civil war has turned the country, perched strategically on the Red Sea, into a global free-for-all. Iran has supplied armed drones to the Sudanese military, which has fought alongside Ukrainian special forces in the capital, Khartoum. Egypt has also sided with the military.
Russia has played both sides. Wagner mercenaries initially supplied missiles to the R.S.F., United Nations inspectors found. More recently, officials say, the Kremlin has tilted to the military, offering it weapons in exchange for naval access to Sudan’s Red Sea coast.
The Houthis of Yemen sent shiploads of weapons to Sudan’s military, at Iran’s behest, and gas-rich Qatar sent six Chinese warplanes, American officials say. (Qatar and the Houthis denied sending military aid.)
Image
Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan, the leader of the Rapid Support Forces paramilitaries, at Sudan’s military headquarters in 2019. He is also widely known as Hemeti.Credit...Declan Walsh/The New York Times
The Emirates has sent an array of weapons as well, officials have concluded.
“The delivery of drones, howitzers, multiple rocket launchers and MANPADS to the R.S.F. by the U.A.E. has helped it neutralize the air superiority” of Sudan’s military, the European Union ambassador to Sudan, Aidan O’Hara, wrote in February in a confidential memo obtained by The Times. (A MANPAD, or Man-Portable Air Defense System, is a type of antiaircraft missile.)
The memo contained other startling assertions: that Saudi Arabia has given money to Sudan’s military, which used it to buy Iranian drones; that as many as 200,000 foreign mercenaries were fighting alongside the R.S.F.; and that Wagner mercenaries had trained the R.S.F. to use the antiaircraft missiles supplied by the Emirates.
The Emirati role appears to be part of a broader push into Africa. Last year, it announced $45 billion in investments across the continent, analysts say, nearly twice as much as China. Recently, it has expanded into a new business: war.
It turned the tide of Ethiopia’s civil war in 2021 by supplying armed drones to the prime minister at a crucial point in the fight, ultimately helping him emerge victorious. Now it appears to be trying to repeat the same feat in Sudan with the R.S.F.
The Arms Pipeline
Last year, when cargo planes began to land at the airport in Amdjarass, 600 miles east of the Chadian capital, Ndjamena, the Emirates said it had come to establish a field hospital for Sudanese refugees.
But within months, American officials discovered that the $20 million hospital quietly treated R.S.F. fighters, and that the cargo planes also carried weapons that were later smuggled to fighters inside Sudan.
The Times analysis of satellite images and flight records showed that the Emiratis set up the drone system at the same time they were promoting their humanitarian operation.
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A promotional video shows the Emirates Red Crescent delivering for the field hospital at Amdjarass, near Chad’s border with Sudan. U.N. investigators say weapons were also delivered under the guise of aid.CreditCredit...Emirates Red Crescent
During a lengthy phone call in early May with his Emirati counterpart, President Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, cited American intelligence that had been declassified so that it could be shared with a foreign official. The evidence documented Emirati military support to the R.S.F., two American officials briefed on the exchange said.
But the American candor appears to have had little impact. The Emirates has only doubled down on its support to the R.S.F. in recent months, American officials and witnesses in Chad say.
Fewer cargo flights now land at Amdjarass airport, where they can be easily detected, but a greater proportion of supplies arrives by truck, often along routes that bypass major cities and towns, officials say.
The New York Times has been following the arrival of aircraft, including Emirati cargo planes, at the airfield in Amdjarass, Chad, for a year.
Aug. 8, 2023
July 15, 2023
May 17, 2024
July 6, 2024
Source: BlackSky; Planet LabsBy The New York Times
Traces of Emirati-supplied weapons are also being found on the battlefield. Human Rights Watch recently identified Serbian-made missiles, fired from an unidentified drone, that it said were originally sold to the Emirates.
“It’s very clear: The U.A.E. is sending money, the U.A.E. is sending weapons,” said Succès Masra, a former prime minister of Chad.
After complaints from Western officials, he said, he told his nation’s president, Mahamat Idriss Déby, that allowing the Emirates to funnel weapons through Chad was a “huge mistake.”
Nothing changed. The Emirates promised Mr. Déby a $1.5 billion loan, nearly as big as Chad’s $1.8 billion national budget a year earlier.
The Emirates supports the R.S.F. in other ways, too. Earlier this year, an Emirati private jet carried the paramilitary force’s leader, General Hamdan, on a tour of six African countries, where he was treated like a head of state.
Dubai, one of the seven emirates that make up the nation, is the hub of the R.S.F.’s business empire, which is anchored in gold trading. The U.S. Treasury has imposed sanctions on what it calls an R.S.F. “front company” and recently listed seven Emirati companies under investigation on suspicion of being linked to the paramilitary group.
General Hamdan’s 34-year-old brother, Algoney Hamdan, has lived in Dubai since 2014 and was singled out by American sanctions. Yet he is now an interlocutor for stuttering peace efforts. Speaking in Switzerland during last month’s talks, Mr. Hamdan brushed off the U.S. measures against him.
“If it brings peace to Sudan, they can sanction as many companies as they want,” he said.
Mr. Hamdan conceded that some R.S.F. troops had committed abuses, but insisted the Emirates was not backing the R.S.F.
“There is no proof of anything,” he said. “It’s just false propaganda.”
A Cherished Symbol of Aid
The Emirati operation in Chad has deeply worried the Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent, one of the world’s oldest and most venerable aid movements.
It learned only from news reports that the Emirates Red Crescent had established a hospital in Amdjarass, said Tommaso Della Longa, a Red Cross spokesman. The Emirates Red Crescent, which is funded by the Emirati government, did not inform the international federation, as it should have, he added.
The Emiratis eagerly touted their largess. The government’s publicity showed workers unloading cargo pallets and treating patients under the Red Crescent logo — an emblem dating back to the 1870s that is legally protected under the Geneva Conventions. Misuse of that symbol is a potential war crime.
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A photograph released by Emirati state media showing aid after two Emirati aircraft have arrived in Amdjarass, Chad, in November.Credit...Emirates News Agency
Worried that its reputation for neutrality was at risk, the Red Cross sent fact-finding missions to Chad in 2023 and 2024, “to better understand” what the Emiratis were doing under the Red Crescent banner in Amdjarass, Mr. Della Longa said.
They found few answers.
When the officials arrived, they were turned away from the Emirati field hospital for unspecified “security reasons,” Mr. Della Longa said. The officials eventually left Chad without setting foot in the hospital.
The Emirates Red Crescent did not respond to questions.
Mr. Konyndyk, the Refugees International official, said it was “unheard-of” for an aid organization to bar its own officials from visiting a hospital that supposedly treats refugees.
“The Emirates seems to be instrumentalizing the Red Crescent as cover for well-documented arms shipments to a militia that is actively committing atrocities in Darfur.”
In June, Emirati officials said they had treated nearly 30,000 patients, and were looking to expand the hospital, but people in Amdjarass say the hospital opens for just four hours a day.
The Emirates opened a second field hospital in Chad, in the city of Abéché in April. When The Times visited the 80-bed facility in July, doctors readily offered a tour of its well-equipped wards, which the hospital’s director, Dr. Khalid Mohammed, said received as many as 250 patients every day.
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Patients wait to be seen at a field hospital in the Chadian city of Abéché, built by the Emirates at a cost of $20 million, which opened in April.Credit...Ivor Prickett for The New York Times
A private Emirati company ran the hospital, and it had no connection with the Red Cross or Crescent, he said. But the hospital closed at 4 p.m. each day, limiting the medical services it could provide.
The Red Cross says it is still trying to figure out what the Emiratis are up to.
“The process is not finished,” Mr. Della Longa, the Red Cross spokesman, said of the inquiry into the Amdjarass hospital. “We want to get to the bottom of it.”
Counterbalancing Iran
As Sudan plunges deeper into what many experts called the world’s biggest humanitarian crisis, American officials say they are more sharply focused on the conflict than ever.
Antony J. Blinken, the secretary of state, organized last month’s peace talks in Switzerland despite their low chance of halting the fighting.
And Mr. Sullivan, the national security adviser, intervened directly with officials from Saudi Arabia when they appeared to be obstructing talks, said three people with knowledge of the interactions.
But the Biden administration is divided on a fundamental question: How hard should it push the Emirates?
When the U.S. envoy to Sudan, Tom Perriello, suggested on a podcast on Sept. 4 that he supported a boycott of the Emirates by the rapper Macklemore, who recently canceled a Dubai show over the Emirates’ role in Sudan, it provoked a furious private reaction from Emirati officials, several officials said.
“I sure didn’t have Macklemore as hero for Sudan on my bingo card,” Mr. Perriello said on the podcast.
Some senior White House and State Department officials felt Mr. Perriello had gone too far, while others cringed at the idea of cowing to the Emiratis for the sake of good relations.
The dispute reflected the limits of challenging the Emirates, a country the United States relies on for many global priorities. The Emirates is a staunch American ally against Iran, a signatory of the Abraham Accords to establish diplomatic relations with Israel, a potential player in postwar Gaza, and it has even facilitated prisoner swaps between Ukraine and Russia.
The Gulf state has shrugged off international censure before, notably over its role in Yemen, but it appears to be sensitive to growing criticism over Sudan.
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An empty street in the heavily destroyed Al-Shaabi market in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, in April.Credit...Ivor Prickett for The New York Times
When European diplomats considered last February whether the nation “would have any qualms about the slaughter and devastation” caused by its actions in Sudan, the confidential E.U. memo said, the diplomats concluded that the Emiratis “would be more concerned about any damage to their reputation rather than any sense of moral culpability.”
But whether the Emiratis would be willing to cede Sudan to one of the many rival powers piling into the war, especially Iran, is another matter entirely.
The prospect of Iran gaining a foothold on the Western shores of the Red Sea has clearly unnerved the Emirates and several other Arab countries involved in Sudan, officials say.
That sense of alarm is driving a proxy war and prompting rival powers to pour ever more weapons into Sudan, pushing the tottering state toward complete collapse.
The Emiratis say Sudanese refugees are grateful for the Emirati help. But the anger among others is growing.
Last week, when Ms. Nusseibeh, the Emirati minister who took part in peace talks in Switzerland, visited one of the hospitals in Chad to showcase her country’s good works, she was confronted by an infuriated Sudanese refugee.
“You know very well that you ignited this war!” yelled a man during a public meeting, in an exchange that quickly spread on social media. “We don’t want anything from you, except that you stop it.”
Speaking by phone, the man, who asked to be identified as Suliman out of fear of reprisals, said he hadn’t been able to contain himself.
R.S.F. brutality had forced him to flee Sudan a year earlier, joining 800,000 refugees now in Chad, he said. So when the Emirati minister sat before him, he said, he saw “the reason my house was destroyed.”
“I lost everything,” he said. “I had to get up and say what was in my heart.”
Julian Barnes and Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington, and Shuaib Almosawa from Bangalore, India. Videos and graphics by Alexander Cardia and Josh Holder.
Declan Walsh is the chief Africa correspondent for The Times based in Nairobi, Kenya. He previously reported from Cairo, covering the Middle East, and Islamabad, Pakistan. More about Declan Walsh
Christoph Koettl is a Times reporter on the Visual Investigations team. More about Christoph Koettl
8. I Survived Hamas Captivity, but I’m Not Yet Free
Excerpts:
The hostages kidnapped by Hamas on October 7 came from 24 different countries; they were Muslim, Jewish, Christian, and Buddhist. They were daughters, fathers, grandfathers, babies. I’m asking the United States government not to give up on them. I’m asking Israel’s leaders to bring our hostages home. Don’t abandon them. Don’t let our loved ones be killed.
The last time I saw my husband was on November 26. I told our captors that I was not going to leave him. “Either he comes or I stay,” I said. They pointed their guns at me and forced me through the door. Keith promised that he would stay strong, for me and our family, and that he would be home soon.
I cannot wait any longer.
I Survived Hamas Captivity, but I’m Not Yet Free
I’m singularly focused on getting my husband and the rest of the hostages out of Gaza, the only way I know how.
By Aviva Siegel
The Atlantic · by Aviva Siegel · September 20, 2024
The last time I saw my husband, Keith, was on November 26. He was lying on a filthy mattress on the floor of a darkened room and could barely look at me. We had spent 51 days together as Hamas’s hostages after being violently abducted from our home on October 7. I had been told earlier that day that my name was on the list; I was to be released and sent back home to Israel. Keith was to be left behind.
My long journey out of Gaza was filled with fear and sadness. I was sure our son had been murdered on October 7 in Kibbutz Kfar Aza, where we lived. The Hamas terrorists had been telling us throughout our captivity that Israel had been destroyed; I didn’t know what I would find. When I finally arrived at the border, I was told that all four of my children were waiting for me in the hospital. The attack on Kfar Aza had killed 64 people, and another 19 had been taken hostage, but my son had miraculously survived. I looked up and saw the moon for the first time in 51 days and screamed with joy and relief that he was alive and I was free.
I spent my first night of freedom in the hospital with my three daughters. I slept for perhaps an hour—I was in shock, and adrenaline was coursing through my body. I had lost 20 pounds and was weak and sick. I could not get my head around the fact that I had been separated from Keith, my husband of 43 years and my constant companion. Every day since—for nearly 300 days—I have been fighting for his release with every ounce of my being.
Franklin Foer: Hamas’s devastating murder of Hersh Goldberg-Polin
I think about Keith all the time, but I feel a particular pang whenever I drink water, when I take a shower, when I eat something delicious. As a hostage in Gaza, these are not things I could do. The most frustrating part is that I don’t know anything about Keith’s condition: Is he alone? (I’d love for someone to tell me that he’s not.) Is he sad, or crying? Is he in a tunnel with no oxygen? Is he sick or being tortured? Has he eaten any food at all today? Is he alive?
Keith is an American citizen. He was born and raised in Chapel Hill, North Carolina—also the hometown of James Taylor, his favorite singer. In his early 20s, he moved to Israel, where we met and started a life together. I was a nursery-school teacher, working with the children of the kibbutz, and Keith was an occupational therapist who was working for a pharmaceutical company. Our entire lives centered on supporting each other and our community, nourishing the next generation with family time and instilling the values of respect, integrity, and acceptance of the other in our four children and five grandchildren.
Keith is the kindest, most gentle man you could ever meet. He makes friends wherever he goes and is universally loved by people and animals. Thirty years ago, Keith learned Arabic so that he could talk with the Palestinian workers on the kibbutz, whom he swiftly befriended. A lifelong vegetarian, he held fast to his values in captivity. He wouldn’t even eat a few tiny morsels of chicken when the terrorists gave us more than our standard daily rations of half a pita or a few bites of plain rice.
We are both lifelong peacemakers and activists. That’s one reason what happened to us and to our community was so shocking.
On the morning of October 7, when the alarms sounded, we locked ourselves in our safe room. There were terrifying explosions and screams, and then suddenly 15 gun-wielding terrorists walked into our home, through a door we’d thought was locked. Keith put his head on his knees and covered his head with his arms; they fired a bullet through his hand and blood was everywhere. I screamed with a force I had never known before. Soon, the terrorists dragged us to Keith’s car. All around us were scenes of fire, violence, and death. I couldn’t stop thinking about my son, who lived just a few minutes away. How could he survive this?
We arrived in Gaza and found people celebrating everywhere. We were bleeding and in shock. I couldn’t believe anyone could be happy to see two people in their 60s in such a state. The terrorists led us to a tunnel shaft, and we climbed down a rickety ladder into one of the scariest places I’d ever seen. It was damp and we could hardly breathe. There were electric lights on the path, which was a relief, because I’m scared of the dark. Keith’s ribs were broken and his hand was still bleeding. Within a few hours, they moved us aboveground to a room in an apartment with three yoga mats on the floor. The window was covered and we were not allowed to move. It was absolutely filthy.
Keith and I were moved 13 times while I was in Gaza, from darkened rooms in private homes to terrifying tunnels without oxygen, light, or sanitation. We were treated with pure brutality, and knew we could die at any moment. We were not seen as human beings. We were starved while our captors ate. We were beaten, humiliated, and kept in disgusting conditions with no way to take care of our basic hygiene or survival needs. We depended on terrorists for every sip of water as they guarded us with their guns and threatened to kill us if we spoke or moved around. There were times I wanted to die.
And there were many times I thought I would die. The buildings shook and walls crumbled with the launch of every missile. It seemed like the terrorists were firing them from our building. Many times a day, we heard the bell of a mosque and then, a moment later, the launch of a missile from the same direction. And, of course, we heard the Israel Defense Forces bombing close by. Between the missiles, the bombs, and the constant threat of being shot or beaten, it’s a miracle I survived.
Keith and I were always held along with at least one other hostage, and sometimes up to three others. All of them were young women. All of the girls we were held with are still stuck in Gaza today. Each of them was sexually abused. The terrorists forced them to undress, and gave them children’s clothes to wear that were far too small. They watched them shower and touched them however and whenever they felt like it. I wanted to scream, but I had to stay quiet. I wasn’t allowed to feel or cry. I was not allowed to console the girls. They could have been my kids. And each of these girls has a family who can’t sleep at night, after almost a year, as they worry about bringing them home.
For those who deny that any sexual assaults have taken place: I wish you were right. But I’ve seen it myself. I’ll never forget their faces. I will never stop fighting for these girls’ freedom.
Since returning to Israel, I have worked to rebuild my physical strength. I could barely walk for the first few days. It took six weeks for me to be able to eat a normal meal. Nearly 300 days later, my body is still not the same as it was before I was kidnapped. As I’m getting stronger physically, I’m also working tirelessly to maintain some stability for my kids and grandchildren, who are exhausted and devastated from this endless struggle. We all need to keep it together as we engage in the most important fight of our lives.
I’m not ready to go back to my home in Kfar Aza. Instead, I’ve moved between my children’s houses in different parts of the country. I haven’t had time to grieve the 64 people from my community who were slaughtered. I’m singularly focused on getting Keith and the rest of the hostages out of Gaza, the only way I know how. I spend hours every day speaking with the media, delegations, politicians, heads of state, religious groups, and other organizations. Keeping the hostage issue at the top of people’s minds is the only thing I can do. This week I’m in the U.S., and will speak before Congress and at the United Nations. I understand that I am one of the few people able to communicate the experience of being held hostage, and the urgency of bringing the remaining hostages home. I take this role very seriously.
I’m not alone in this fight. Many of the hostages who were released during the November deal left Gaza with loved ones still in captivity. We are all unable to heal fully until everyone is home safely.
The international community, with its promises of solidarity and support, does not fully grasp the personal tragedy of those who are left waiting. We are not just statistics or stories. We are real people with real families, struggling with the most intense sadness, exhaustion, and frustration. Keith’s captivity is not just a political issue or a humanitarian tragedy. It is a deeply painful and personal wound.
Today, we know more than ever about the extreme conditions and violence that Keith and the other hostages are living in. A few weeks, ago six hostages—Ori Danino, Carmel Gat, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Alex Lobanov, Almog Sarusi, and Eden Yerushalmi—were executed in the tunnels after surviving 332 days in hellish conditions. Those six families could have been reunited with the people they have been fighting to free for almost a year. Instead, they buried them.
We need a deal to bring Keith and the other hostages home, now. I was there. I know what they’re going through. If your family or friends were there, you would do everything in your power to get them out.
Every moment since my release, I’ve been fully consumed with freeing Keith and the other hostages out of that hell. There isn’t a head of state, member of parliament, news network, tech leader, or global organization that my family and I haven’t reached out to over the past months with a simple message: Get them out now, or they’ll be murdered.
But now, as I wait for news of Keith, I feel helpless. I am at the mercy of negotiations, of political strategies, and of decisions made far from the emotional core of this situation. I have learned that hope is a double-edged sword, at once a source of strength, pushing me through each day, and a terrifying reminder of what is at stake. My daughters tell me, whenever a deal is on the table, not to dare to hope, or my heart will shatter again.
David Brooks: How do the families of the Hamas hostages endure the agony?
In moments of quiet, I think of the other families who are caught in the crossfire of this awful war, at the mercy of decisions made by politicians. The price we all pay is immeasurable; the assurances of a future peace ring hollow when it is your family being torn apart.
My plea is simple: I don’t want any more innocent people to die. I want this war to end so the hostages can return to their families and the good people in Gaza can rebuild their lives. I am asking the global community to help us bring the hostages home, to release them from Hamas’s torture and allow people to heal.
The hostages kidnapped by Hamas on October 7 came from 24 different countries; they were Muslim, Jewish, Christian, and Buddhist. They were daughters, fathers, grandfathers, babies. I’m asking the United States government not to give up on them. I’m asking Israel’s leaders to bring our hostages home. Don’t abandon them. Don’t let our loved ones be killed.
The last time I saw my husband was on November 26. I told our captors that I was not going to leave him. “Either he comes or I stay,” I said. They pointed their guns at me and forced me through the door. Keith promised that he would stay strong, for me and our family, and that he would be home soon.
I cannot wait any longer.
About the Author
Aviva Siegel is an Israeli citizen who was captured and held hostage by Hamas.
The Atlantic · by Aviva Siegel · September 20, 2024
9. Ukraine Hits 2 More Russian Munition Depots, Aiming to Disrupt War Effort
Ukraine Hits 2 More Russian Munition Depots, Aiming to Disrupt War Effort
Strikes on weapons arsenals are crucial to weaken Moscow’s overwhelming superiority in battlefield firepower, analysts said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/21/world/europe/ukraine-russia-war-ammunition-depots.html
Ukrainian troops during weapons training this month in the eastern Donetsk region.Credit...Nicole Tung for The New York Times
By Constant Méheut
Reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine
Sept. 21, 2024
Ukraine said on Saturday that it had struck two large ammunition depots deep inside Russia overnight. It was the second such attack in less than a week as Kyiv seeks to escalate hits on Russian military bases and warehouses to try to disrupt Moscow’s military logistics and slow its troops’ advance on the battlefield.
The strikes announced on Saturday targeted ammunition depots near the towns of Toropets, in northwestern Russia, and Tikhoretsk, in the country’s southwest. The facilities are both more than 200 miles from Ukrainian-controlled territory, and one has been identified as a major storage facility for munitions Russia has acquired from North Korea.
Ukraine said its armed forces had struck the depot near Toropets with drones, but it stopped short of specifying the types of weapons used in the attack on Tikhoretsk, saying only that the arsenals had been “hit by fire,” raising the possibility that it had used a new kind of weapon.
The attack came as Kyiv has been pressing its allies for weeks to let it use powerful, Western-delivered missiles to strike targets deep inside Russia. That authorization has yet to be granted, according to Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, and in the meantime his country has sought to modify missiles and drones already in its arsenal for long-range use.
Moscow has not directly acknowledged the strikes on the depots, but regional authorities said that a drone attack on Tikhoretsk had “caused a fire that spread to explosive objects” and triggered detonations. Some 1,200 residents were evacuated from the area. The Russian state news agency Tass reported that a drone attack near Toropets had forced the evacuation of a train station and the suspension of traffic on a highway.
NASA satellites detected multiple fires at the two depots on Saturday. The attack came four days after another ammunition depot near Toropets was hit by Ukrainian drones, causing a huge explosion, with videos showing large fireballs lighting up the night sky.
Strikes on weapons arsenals are crucial for Ukraine to weaken Russia’s overwhelming fire superiority on the battlefield, military experts have said. Every week, Moscow bombards Ukrainian frontline positions and cities with missiles, guided bombs and artillery shells. Ukrainian soldiers have long been outgunned at the front, with Mr. Zelensky saying in April that Russia fires 10 shells for every Ukrainian one.
Serhii Kuzan, chairman of the Ukrainian Security and Cooperation Center, a nongovernmental research group, said, “The only way to defeat the Russian Army is to defeat its logistics,” most specifically by destroying its ammunition depots.
“This is the destruction of the most key component of warfare,” he added. “Tanks and guns without ammunition will not fire and will simply be ineffective.”
The earlier attack on an ammunition depot this week took place on Wednesday, just outside Toropets, and appears to have caused serious damage. NASA satellites continued to detect fires at that depot on Saturday, and satellite imagery released by the British Defense Ministry showed destroyed storage bunkers and 280-foot-wide craters.
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A satellite image showing ammunition bunkers on fire after an explosion at a weapons depot on Wednesday in Toropets, Russia.Credit...Maxar Technologies, via Reuters
The British ministry said that the depot “almost certainly housed munitions of varying calibers for frontline use, as well as missiles and glide bombs used by nearby airfields.”
Col. Ants Kiviselg, head of Estonia’s military intelligence center, told journalists on Friday that “30,000 tons of explosive ordnance were detonated” in the attack, the equivalent of about 750,000 shells.
“That’s two to three months’ supply of ammunition” for Russian forces in Ukraine, he noted. “As a result of this attack, Russia has suffered losses in ammunition and we will see the impact of these losses on the front in the coming weeks.”
His assessment could not be immediately confirmed.
It is unclear whether Saturday’s attacks had a similar impact. But one of the two depots that was targeted, the one near Tikhoretsk, has been used as a storage site for North Korean munitions shipped to Russia, as documented by several think tanks and confirmed by the White House last fall.
Since late 2022, Russia has turned to buying shells and missiles from North Korea, which has a vast supply of Soviet-era weaponry, U.S. officials and independent analysts have said.
Many of those weapons arrived at the Tikhoretsk depot, whose storage capacity has recently been increased, according to reports by the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies and the London-based Royal United Services Institute.
Imagery from late September 2023 “shows trains arriving at the facility, delivering dozens of containers of the same size and colors as those being loaded in North Korea,” the institute’s report said.
The Ukrainian Army said that 2,000 tons of ammunition, including some from North Korea, had been delivered to the depot shortly before Saturday’s strike. The claim could not be independently verified.
Ukrainian officials have said that the injection of North Korean weapons into the battlefield, particularly artillery shells, has helped Russian forces maintain an edge.
“Of all Russia’s allies, our biggest problem is North Korea,” Gen. Kyrylo Budanov, the head of Ukraine’s military intelligence, said at a security conference last week in Kyiv. “Because with the volume of military products that they supply, they actually affect the intensity of the fighting.”
Analysts say that the Tikhoretsk depot has also been an important nexus in supplying Russian forces. It is roughly equidistant from the combat zone in southeastern Ukraine and from Crimea, the Russian-occupied peninsula that has been an important logistics hub for funneling ammunition to the rest of the southern front.
The full array of weapons Ukraine used to attack the depots is unclear.
Justin Bronk, a senior research fellow for air power and technology at the Royal United Services Institute, said it was “entirely possible to set off ammunition stored in the open even with relatively small warheads” carried by attack drones “if they hit the right place.”
But Mr. Kuzan said that the ammunition depots were often protected with earth berms and underground concrete shelters that made them difficult to attack with drones.
“To do this you need not just a missile, it must be a heavy missile,” he said, pointing to long-range weapons supplied to Ukraine by Western allies, such as the British-French Storm Shadow missiles.
But Ukraine has so far been barred by its allies from using those weapons inside Russia. Mr. Zelensky told journalists on Friday that the White House was afraid that such an authorization would escalate the war. He said he would use a trip to the United States next week to try to persuade President Biden to lift the ban.
To circumvent it for now, at least partially, Ukraine has begun developing its own weapons, such as anti-ship missiles modified for land attacks, which it says it has already used to target Russia’s oil infrastructure. Kyiv also says it has developed long-range rocket drones that carry large warheads and can strike targets hundreds of miles away.
Constant Méheut reports on the war in Ukraine, including battlefield developments, attacks on civilian centers and how the war is affecting its people. More about Constant Méheut
A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 22, 2024, Section A, Page 10 of the New York edition with the headline: Deep in Russia, Ukraine Hits 2 More Arms Depots. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
10. From Crisis to Comeback: The Army is Turning the Tide on Recruitment
Excerpts:
Conclusion
Looking ahead, the Army must continue adapting its recruitment strategies to meet the demands of a competitive labor market. Corporate jobs offering competitive pay and benefits attract many of the same young Americans the military seeks to enlist. Additionally, the Army must contend with lingering public concerns about the physical and mental toll of military service, as well as the quality of post-service life, which remain significant barriers for potential recruits and their families.
Despite ongoing challenges, the Army remains determined to rebuild its ranks and prepare for large-scale conflicts with near-peer adversaries. Expanding training programs and raising standards for recruits form part of a broader strategy to ensure the U.S. military remains capable of meeting the complex demands of modern warfare. The next year will be critical for the Army as it builds on recent recruitment gains and prepares soldiers for the future of global conflict. Secretary Warmuth is leading the Army with right approach, ideas, and energy. It is what our nation's Army needs and deserves.
From Crisis to Comeback: The Army is Turning the Tide on Recruitment
Strategy Central, For and By Practitioners
By Monte Erfourth, September 21, 2024
https://www.strategycentral.io/post/from-crisis-to-comeback-the-army-is-turning-the-tide-on-recruitment?postId=cb08b5b0-119b-402f-8685-040e134c05e8&utm
Introduction
The U.S. military faces a significant recruiting crisis, with enlistment shortages across nearly all branches. Numerous internal and external challenges severely affect the military's ability to attract and retain new recruits. Military families have historically served as a critical pipeline for recruitment, contributing nearly 80% of all new Army enlistees. However, after two decades of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, many veterans—once the strongest advocates for military service—are now discouraging their children and other family members from enlisting. This shift raises concerns as it threatens one of the military's most reliable sources of recruits. Veterans who endured the physical and emotional toll of multiple deployments, including issues like post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), rising suicide rates, and inadequate care, now question whether military service is worth the cost.
The Crisis
Sky Nisperos, a young woman who had long dreamed of becoming an Air Force pilot, exemplifies this growing disillusionment. Raised in a military family and inspired by her father's service, Sky now reconsiders her path due to his advice. Sky's father, an active-duty Air Force officer with two decades of experience, shares the concerns of many other influential figures, including parents, coaches, and pastors, who once encouraged military service but now advise young people to seek other career opportunities. The military has lost its appeal as a desirable career option for many families, especially those familiar with its demands and hardships.
Veteran disillusionment is acute, particularly after the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. For many who spent years fighting in the Middle East, the withdrawal felt like a betrayal of their sacrifices, leading to feelings of futility and frustration. Catalina Gasper, a Navy veteran injured during an attack in Kabul, exemplifies this sentiment. After years of service and multiple injuries, she now questions the purpose of her time in the military and wants to prevent her children from following in her footsteps. This disenchantment, along with rising political polarization surrounding the military, has contributed to declining interest in service among both conservative and liberal Americans. Critics on the right accuse the military of becoming too "woke," while those on the left view it as a bastion of conservative values. These political divisions complicate recruitment efforts and make it harder for the military to appeal to a broad cross-section of the population.
Broader societal issues further exacerbate this decline in enlistment. After years of protracted conflicts in the Middle East without clear victories or objectives, and plenty of evidence of lies about the wars coming from political and military leaders, the military’s image has suffered. Trust in the military has dropped from 70% to 48% in just the last few years. Scandals involving substandard housing, inadequate healthcare, and low pay for lower-ranking troops have worsened public perception. Many young people no longer view the military as a stable career offering benefits and advancement opportunities. Instead, private-sector jobs—offering immediate pay, fewer long-term commitments, and better benefits—have become more attractive. Currently, only 9% of young people between the ages of 16 and 21 are considering military service, down from 13% before the COVID-19 pandemic. This declining interest alarms military planners, who face an ever-shrinking pool of qualified candidates.
The recruiting problem looms large. In 2022, the U.S. Army fell 25% short of its recruiting target, missing approximately 15,000 recruits. The Navy and Air Force face similar challenges, with the Navy expecting a 10,000-recruit shortfall in 2023, and the Air Force projecting a gap of around 3,000. While the Marine Corps has met its recruitment targets, its leaders admit that the process has grown increasingly difficult. These shortfalls are more than a numbers problem; they have broader implications for military readiness, particularly as the U.S. faces renewed global competition from China and Russia. Without improved recruitment numbers, the military may need to reduce its overall force size, a concerning prospect given the current global security environment.
The Army Has A Plan
Pentagon officials recognize the gravity of the situation and have begun addressing it. Army Secretary Christine Wormuth leads efforts to overhaul recruitment strategies, modernize marketing campaigns, improve benefits, and collaborate with veterans' organizations to engage potential recruits more effectively. The military has revamped its marketing, reintroducing slogans like "Be All You Can Be" to emphasize career development and personal growth opportunities within the armed forces. The Army has also launched remedial programs to help underqualified recruits meet military standards. One of the most successful initiatives is the Future Soldier Prep Course, introduced in 2022 at Fort Jackson, South Carolina.
Designed to give lower-performing recruits up to 90 days of academic and physical fitness training, the Future Soldier Prep Course helps them meet the military's rigorous entry requirements. This program has already yielded promising results, closing some gaps left by previous recruitment shortfalls. By the end of the fiscal year, the Army expects this course to bring in nearly 20,000 recruits, providing a critical boost to its numbers. Army leaders remain optimistic that this success marks a turning point and plan to expand such programs further to address recruitment challenges.
Preparing For War: Quality Over Quantity
Even as the military struggles with recruitment, progress is evident. The Army, encouraged by improved numbers from the Future Soldier Prep Course, plans to expand its basic training operations. Starting in October 2024, two new training facilities will open—one at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and another at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. Each facility will train up to 4,000 recruits per year. This expansion is part of a broader effort to ensure the Army can meet the challenges of future conflicts, especially those involving technologically advanced adversaries like Russia and China.
The Army's renewed focus on training reflects its strategic shift from counterinsurgency operations to preparing for large-scale conventional conflicts. After spending much of the past two decades in counterinsurgency wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army is now emphasizing advanced skills like cyber warfare, artificial intelligence, and emerging technologies. These capabilities are essential as the military prepares for potential conflicts with near-peer adversaries that possess sophisticated military assets.
Expanding training facilities marks a positive step forward for the Army. By increasing training capacity, the Army can better prepare recruits for the challenges of modern warfare. Brig. Gen. Jenn Walkawicz, overseeing operations for the Army's Training and Doctrine Command, highlights the momentum generated by the Future Soldier Prep Course. According to Walkawicz, this program's success has filled the Army's ranks with more qualified recruits, making the force not only larger but more capable.
Although the recruitment crisis is not over, the situation shows signs of improvement. The Army’s efforts to expand training, modernize recruitment, and address misconceptions about military service are producing positive results. However, challenges remain. Only 23% of Americans aged 17 to 24 meet the Army's physical, academic, and moral requirements for enlistment without a waiver. This pool of eligible candidates continues to shrink due to rising rates of obesity, drug use, and other disqualifying factors. Additionally, the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted recruiting efforts by limiting in-person events and access to high schools, making it harder for recruiters to engage with potential enlistees.
Conclusion
Looking ahead, the Army must continue adapting its recruitment strategies to meet the demands of a competitive labor market. Corporate jobs offering competitive pay and benefits attract many of the same young Americans the military seeks to enlist. Additionally, the Army must contend with lingering public concerns about the physical and mental toll of military service, as well as the quality of post-service life, which remain significant barriers for potential recruits and their families.
Despite ongoing challenges, the Army remains determined to rebuild its ranks and prepare for large-scale conflicts with near-peer adversaries. Expanding training programs and raising standards for recruits form part of a broader strategy to ensure the U.S. military remains capable of meeting the complex demands of modern warfare. The next year will be critical for the Army as it builds on recent recruitment gains and prepares soldiers for the future of global conflict. Secretary Warmuth is leading the Army with right approach, ideas, and energy. It is what our nation's Army needs and deserves.
Endnotes
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Lolita C. Baldor, "As Recruiting Rebounds, Army to Expand Basic Training, Rebuild for War," Army Times, August 4, 2024.
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Ben Kesling, "The Military Recruiting Crisis: Even Veterans Don’t Want Their Families to Join," The Wall Street Journal, June 30, 2023.
11. As Taliban starts restricting men too, some regret not speaking up sooner
As Taliban starts restricting men too, some regret not speaking up sooner
Beside imposing severe rules on women, new laws require men to grow fist-length beards and bar them from imitating non-Muslims in appearance or behavior.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/09/22/afghanistan-taliban-restrictions-men-beards/
Afghan men ride motorcycles along a road in Kandahar, Afghanistan, on Aug. 28. (Wakil Kohsar/AFP/Getty Images)
By Rick Noack
September 22, 2024 at 2:00 a.m. EDT
As the Taliban starts enforcing draconian new rules on women in Afghanistan, it has also begun to target a group that didn’t see tight restrictions on them coming: Afghan men.
Women have faced an onslaught of increasingly severe limits on their personal freedom and rules about their dress since the Taliban seized power three years ago. But men in urban areas could, for the most part, carry on freely.
The past four weeks, however, have brought significant changes for them, too. New laws promulgated in late August mandate that men wear a fist-long beard, bar them from imitating non-Muslims in appearance or behavior, widely interpreted as a prohibition against jeans, and ban haircuts that are against Islamic law, which essentially means short or Western styles. Men are now also prohibited from looking at women other than their wives or relatives.
As a result, more are growing beards, carrying prayer rugs and leaving their jeans at home.
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These first serious restrictions on men have come as a surprise to many in Afghanistan, according to a range of Afghans, including Taliban opponents, wavering supporters and even members of the Taliban regime, who spoke in phone interviews over the past two weeks. In a society where a man’s voice is often perceived as far more powerful than a woman’s, some men now wonder whether they should have spoken up sooner to defend the freedoms of their wives and daughters.
“If men had raised their voices, we might also be in a different situation now,” said a male resident of the capital, Kabul, who like others interviewed for this story spoke on the condition of anonymity or that only their first names be used due to fears of drawing unwanted scrutiny from the regime. “Now, everyone is growing a beard because we don’t want to be questioned, humiliated,” he said.
Mohammad Faqir Mohammadi, center, deputy of the Taliban’s Ministry of Virtue and Vice, speaks during a news conference in Kabul on Aug. 20. (Wakil Kohsar/AFP/Getty Images)
The Taliban’s new rules governing men pale in comparison with restrictions the government has placed on girls and women, who remain banned from going to school above sixth grade, barred from universities and were recently prohibited from raising their voices in public, among many other rules.
But newly empowered religious morality officers, known for their white robes, have been knocking over the past four weeks on the doors of men in some parts of Kabul who haven’t recently attended mosque, according to residents. Government employees said they fear they’ll be let go for having failed to grow their beards, and some barbers now refuse to trim them. Increasingly, male taxi drivers are being stopped for violating gender segregation rules, by having unaccompanied female riders in their cars, or for playing music.
The new laws give the morality police authority to detain suspects for up to three days. In severe cases, such as repeated failure to pray in the mosque, suspects can be handed over to courts for trial and sentencing based on their interpretation of Islamic sharia law. Violations of the new rules are expected to be punished by fines or prison terms. But people found guilty of some infractions, for example adultery, could be sentenced to flogging or death by stoning.
Amir, a resident who lives in eastern Afghanistan, said he supported the Taliban up until the latest restrictions. But he now feels bullied into submission by their morality police.
“We all are practicing Muslims and know what is mandatory or not. But it’s unacceptable to use force on us,” he said. He added, “Even people who have supported the Taliban are now trying to leave the country.”
Most men interviewed for this story live in Kabul, the country’s most cosmopolitan city, or other urban areas. Residents of more conservative and traditional parts of Afghanistan said they have noticed barely any changes. A male resident of rural Helmand, in southern Afghanistan, said no one in his village has concerns and such rules have long been customary there. “No morality police has showed up here so far. They focus on the cities,” he said.
The new restrictions appear to reflect a broader shift in the balance of power inside the Taliban, with the most conservative elements either gaining influence or seeking to assert themselves more aggressively in urban areas, according to Western officials and Afghan critics of the Taliban.
The Ministry of Vice and Virtue, which directs the morality police, could not be reached for comment. A former senior official with the Ministry of Vice and Virtue denied that the ministry is increasingly turning into a shadow law enforcement agency, saying its primary responsibility remains preaching. He spoke on the condition of anonymity because he is no longer authorized to respond to journalists.
The faces and heads of mannequins are covered with tin foil at a men’s apparel store in Kabul. In Afghanistan’s capital, shop windows display dazzling ball gowns and three-piece wedding suits — with the face of each mannequin covered. The morality police have asked store operators to hide the mannequins’ faces and photographs of models, according to a clothes seller in Kabul. (Wakil Kohshar/AFP/Getty Images)
The new restrictions on women include a ban on them raising their voices, reciting the Quran in public and looking at men other than their husbands or relatives. Women must also cover the lower half of their faces in addition to donning a head covering they were already expected to wear.
The crackdown by morality police in urban areas, where some religious rules had been rarely enforced, has heightened anxiety among women. For men, it has come as a shock.
A 36-year old male driver in Kabul said the new restrictions feel “enormous” and pose a growing hardship for his work. His revenue has declined by 70 percent since late August, he said, partly because the Taliban has begun enforcing a rule that bans women from traveling alone in taxis.
Even in some government offices, a new sense of dread has set in. A former Taliban supporter recalled how a friend, who still works for the regime, recently had his salary withheld because his beard wasn’t sufficiently long.
“We are hearing that some of the civil servants, whose beards were shorter than the required length, were barred from entering their departments,” said a government employee, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to journalists.
For the past three years, Afghan women often felt alone in their anguish. Some grew exasperated by their husbands’ silence or growing support for the Taliban, which tried to win public favor by building roads and repairing tunnels.
Several women said they hope their protests will soon be joined by Afghan men. “Men were silent from day one, which gave the Taliban the courage to keep imposing such rules,” said a 24-year-old female resident in Kabul. “Now, the Taliban is finally losing men’s support,” she said.
Others are skeptical whether criticism of the rules can make a difference.
In interviews, several Kabul residents said they have begun in recent weeks to look more seriously into leaving the country.
“But if more young people flee this country,” said a male Kabul resident, “there won’t be any hope at all.”
Taliban security personnel stands atop a vehicle in front of the former U.S. Embassy in Kabul as they celebrate the third anniversary of Taliban takeover of Afghanistan on Aug. 14. (Wakil Kohshar/AFP/Getty Images)
Haq Nawaz Khan and Lutfullah Qasimyar contributed to this report.
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By Rick Noack
Rick Noack is The Washington Post's Afghanistan bureau chief. Previously at The Post, he was the Paris correspondent, covering France and Europe, and an international affairs reporter based in Berlin, London and Washington.follow on X @rick_n
12. Fact Sheet: 2024 Quad Leaders’ Summit
September 21, 2024
Fact Sheet: 2024 Quad Leaders’ Summit
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2024/09/21/fact-sheet-2024-quad-leaders-summit/?utm
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On September 21, 2024, President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. hosted Prime Minister Anthony Albanese of Australia, Prime Minister Kishida Fumio of Japan, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India in Wilmington, Delaware, for the fourth Quad Leaders’ Summit.
The Quad was established to be a global force for good. This year, the Quad is proudly executing tangible projects that benefit partner countries across the Indo-Pacific—including in the Pacific, Southeast Asia, and the Indian Ocean Region. The Quad is working together at unprecedented scope and scale to deliver on Indo-Pacific partners’ priorities. Together, the Quad is leading ambitious projects to help partners address pandemics and disease; respond to natural disasters; strengthen their maritime domain awareness and maritime security; mobilize and build high-standard physical and digital infrastructure; invest in and benefit from critical and emerging technologies; confront the threat of climate change; bolster cyber security; and cultivate the next generation of technology leaders.
ENDURING PARTNERS FOR THE INDO-PACIFIC
Over the past four years, Quad Leaders have met six times, including twice virtually. Quad Foreign Ministers have met eight times, most recently in Tokyo in July. Quad country representatives convene on a regular basis, at all levels, to consult one another, exchange ideas to advance shared priorities, and deliver benefits for partners across the Indo-Pacific region. All Quad governments have institutionalized the Quad at all levels and across a diverse array of departments and agencies. Today, Quad Leaders announced new initiatives to solidify these habits of cooperation and to set up the Quad to endure for the long-term.
- Each Quad government has committed to work through their respective budgetary processes to secure robust funding for Quad priorities in the Indo-Pacific region to ensure an enduring impact.
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The Quad governments also intend to work with their respective legislatures to deepen interparliamentary exchanges, and encourage other stakeholders to deepen engagement with Quad counterparts. Yesterday, Members of Congress announced the creation of a bipartisan, bicameral Congressional Quad Caucus.
- In the coming months, Quad Commerce and Industry ministers will meet for the first time.
- Quad Leaders also welcome the leaders of the Quad Development Finance Institutions and Agencies deciding to meet to explore future investments by the four countries in the Indo-Pacific, including in health security, food security, clean energy, and quality infrastructure. This builds on a previous meeting in 2022 between the heads of the Export Finance Australia, the Australian Infrastructure Financing Facility for the Pacific, India Export-Import Bank, Japan Bank for International Cooperation, and U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC).
- The United States will host the 2025 Quad Foreign Ministers Meeting, and India will host the 2025 Quad Leaders Summit.
GLOBAL HEALTH & HEALTH SECURITY
In 2023, the Quad announced the Quad Health Security Partnership to strengthen coordination and collaboration in support of health security in the Indo-Pacific. The Quad Health Security Partnership is delivering on its commitments to strengthen the Indo-Pacific’s ability to detect and respond to outbreaks of diseases with epidemic or pandemic potential, including through a set of new initiatives announced today.
Quad Cancer Moonshot
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The Quad is launching the historic Quad Cancer Moonshot, a collective effort to leverage public and private resources to reduce the number of lives lost to cancer in the Indo-Pacific, with an initial focus on cervical cancer. Altogether, the Quad Cancer Moonshot announced today is projected to save hundreds of thousands of lives over the coming decades. More information can be found here.
Pandemic Preparedness
- Quad countries are committed to supporting health security and resiliency efforts across the region, including continued support for the Pandemic Fund.
- The Quad reaffirms commitment to bolstering health security across the Indo-Pacific region. In 2024, the Quad Health Security Partnership advanced regional resilience through the second pandemic preparedness table top exercise, building on the success of the Quad Vaccine Partnership to enhance prevention, early detection, and response to potential disease outbreaks, and is exploring developing Standard Operating Procedures for Pandemic Response. The Quad’s collaborative efforts included training health specialists from the Indo-Pacific to strengthen regional capabilities for health emergencies.
- India will host a workshop on pandemic preparedness and release a white paper outlining emergency public health responses.
- Australia is increasing the pool of public health specialists who are ready to deploy, in-country or in the region, in response to disease outbreaks, with the first training session to commence in Darwin, Australia, in the coming days.
- In coordination with Quad partners, the United States is pledging over $84.5 million to partner with fourteen countries in the Indo-Pacific region to strengthen capacity to prevent, detect, and respond to infectious disease threats.
Mpox
- In response to the current clade I mpox outbreak, as well as the ongoing clade II mpox outbreak, the Quad plans to coordinate our efforts to promote equitable access to safe, effective, quality-assured mpox vaccines, including where appropriate expanding vaccine manufacturing in low and middle-income countries.
HUMANITARIAN ASSISTANCE AND DISASTER RELIEF (HADR)
Twenty years ago, the Quad first came together to respond to the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, surging humanitarian assistance to affected countries. In 2022, Quad Foreign Ministers signed the Guidelines for the Quad Partnership on HADR in the Indo-Pacific. In May 2024, following a tragic landslide in Papua New Guinea, Quad countries coordinated their response in accordance with these guidelines. The Quad collectively provided over $5 million in humanitarian assistance. Quad partners continue to support Papua New Guinea in its longer-term resiliency efforts. The Quad continues to deepen HADR coordination and support partners in the region in their longer-term resiliency efforts.
- Quad governments are working to ensure readiness to rapidly respond, including through pre-positioning of essential relief supplies, in the event of a natural disaster; this effort extends from the Indian Ocean region, to Southeast Asia, to the Pacific.
- In the coming months, Quad HADR experts will conduct a tabletop exercise to prepare for potential future disasters in the region.
- Quad partners are working together to provide over $4 million in humanitarian assistance to support the people of Vietnam in light of the devastating consequences of Typhoon Yagi.
MARITIME SECURITY
Quad partners are working side-by-side with partners throughout the region to bolster maritime security, improve maritime domain awareness, and uphold a free and open Indo-Pacific.
Indo-Pacific Partnership for Maritime Domain Awareness and Maritime Training
- Quad Leaders launched the Indo-Pacific Partnership for Maritime Domain Awareness (IPMDA) at the 2022 Quad Leaders’ Summit in Tokyo. This initiative provides partners with near-real-time, cost-effective, cutting-edge radio frequency data, enabling them to better monitor their waters; counter illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing; respond to climate change and natural disasters; and enforce their laws within their waters.
- Since the announcement, in consultation with partners, the Quad has successfully scaled the program across the Indo-Pacific region—through the Pacific Islands Forum Fisheries Agency, with partners in Southeast Asia, to the Information Fusion Center—Indian Ocean Region, Gurugram. In doing so, the Quad has helped well over two dozen countries access dark vessel maritime domain awareness data, so they can better monitor the activities in their exclusive economic zones—including unlawful activity.
- In the next phase of implementation, announced today, the Quad intends to layer new technology and data into IPMDA over the coming year, to continue to deliver cutting edge capability and information to the region. The Quad intends to leverage electro-optical data and advanced analytic software to sharpen the maritime domain awareness picture for partners.
- Today the Quad announced a new regional Maritime Initiative for Training in the Indo-Pacific (MAITRI) to enable our partners in the region Indo-Pacific partners to maximize tools provided through IPMDA and other Quad partner initiatives, to monitor and secure their waters, enforce their laws, and deter unlawful behavior. The Quad countries look forward to India hosting the inaugural MAITRI workshop in 2025.
- Quad countries are coordinating comprehensive and complementary training across the full suite of legal, operational, and technical maritime security and law enforcement knowledge domains. Quad partners have pledged to expand engagement with regional maritime law enforcement fora, share best practices, and improve civil maritime cooperation.
Indo-Pacific Logistics Network
- The Quad launches today a Quad Indo-Pacific Logistics Network pilot project, to pursue shared airlift capacity among the four nations and leverage collective logistics strengths, in order to support civilian response to natural disasters more rapidly and efficiently across the Indo-Pacific region. This effort will complement existing efforts with Indo-Pacific partners.
Coast Guard Cooperation
- The U.S. Coast Guard, Japan Coast Guard, Australian Border Force, and Indian Coast Guard plan to launch a first-ever Quad-at-Sea Ship Observer Mission in 2025 in the Indo-Pacific to improve interoperability. Through this effort, members of Japan Coast Guard, Australian Border Force, and Indian Coast Guard will spend time on board a U.S. Coast Guard vessel operating in the Indo-Pacific. The Quad intends to continue with further missions in the Indo-Pacific.
QUALITY INFRASTRUCTURE
The Quad is delivering quality, resilient infrastructure to the region to increase connectivity, build regional capacity, and meet critical needs.
- This year, the Quad countries’ export credit agencies (ECAs) signed and are implementing a Memorandum of Cooperation, which supports supply chain resilience, critical and emerging technologies, renewable energy, and other high-quality projects in the Indo-Pacific region, and will pursue joint business promotion efforts that involve industry experts, project developers, and other major market players.
- The Quad released joint Principles for Development and Deployment of Digital Public Infrastructure, underscoring the Quad’s commitment to an inclusive, open, sustainable, fair, safe, reliable, and secure digital future to advance shared prosperity and sustainable development.
- The Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure organized a workshop in India to empower partners across the Indo-Pacific to strengthen power sector resilience.
Quad Ports of the Future Partnership
- The Quad Ports of the Future Partnership will harness the Quad’s expertise to support sustainable and resilient port infrastructure development across the Indo-Pacific, in collaboration with regional partners.
- In 2025, Quad partners intend to hold the inaugural Regional Ports and Transportation Conference, hosted by India in Mumbai.
- Through this new partnership, Quad partners intend to coordinate, exchange information, share best practices with partners in the region, and leverage resources to mobilize government and private sector investments in quality port infrastructure across the Indo-Pacific region.
Quad Infrastructure Fellows
- The Quad Infrastructure Fellowship was announced at the 2023 Quad Leaders’ Summit to improve capacity and deepen professional networks across the region to design, manage, and attract investment in infrastructure projects. Over the past year, it has expanded to more than 2,200 experts, and Quad partners have already provided well over 1,300 fellowships.
Undersea Cables and Digital Connectivity
- Through the Quad Partnership for Cable Connectivity and Resilience, Quad partners continue to support and strengthen quality undersea cable networks in the Indo-Pacific, the capacity, durability, and reliability of which are inextricably linked to the security and prosperity of the region and the world.
- In support of these efforts, Australia launched the Cable Connectivity and Resilience Centre in July, which is delivering workshops and policy and regulatory assistance in response to requests from across the region.
- Japan has conducted capacity building trainings to enhance connectivity and resilience in the Indo-Pacific through cooperation with specialized agencies and international organizations. Japan intends to further extend technical cooperation to improve public information and communication technology infrastructure management capacity for an undersea cable in Nauru and Kiribati.
- The United States has conducted over 1,300 capacity building trainings for telecommunication officials and executives from 25 countries in the Indo-Pacific; today the U.S. announces its intent, working with Congress, to invest an additional $3.4 million to extend and expand this training program.
- Investments in cable projects by Quad partners will help support all Pacific island countries in achieving primary telecommunication cable connectivity by the end of 2025. Since the last Quad Leaders’ Summit, Quad partners have committed over $140 million to undersea cable builds in the Pacific, alongside contributions from other likeminded partners.
- Complementing these investments in new undersea cables, India has commissioned a feasibility study to examine expansion of undersea cable maintenance and repair capabilities in the Indo-Pacific.
CRITICAL AND EMERGING TECHNOLOGY
The Quad is working in lockstep to stay at the forefront of technology innovation, and remains committed to harnessing emerging technologies for the benefit of people across the Indo-Pacific, and deploying these technologies to facilitate economic prosperity, openness, and connectivity.
Open Radio Access Network (RAN) and 5G
- In 2023, Quad partners announced the first-ever Open RAN deployment in the Pacific, in Palau, to support a secure, resilient, and interconnected telecommunications ecosystem. Since then, the Quad has committed approximately $20 million to this effort. Building on this initiative, the Quad announces an expansion of Open RAN collaboration to deliver trusted technology solutions.
- The Quad plans to expand support for ongoing Open RAN field trials and the Asia Open RAN Academy (AORA) in the Philippines, building on the initial $8 million in support that the United States and Japan pledged earlier this year.
- In addition, the United States plans to invest over $7 million to support the global expansion of AORA, including through establishing a first-of-its-kind Open RAN workforce training initiative at scale in South Asia, in partnership with Indian institutions.
- Quad partners also welcome the opportunity to explore additional Open RAN projects in Southeast Asia.
- Quad partners will also explore collaborating with the Tuvalu Telecommunications Corporation to ensure the country’s readiness for nationwide 5G deployment.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
- Through the Advancing Innovations for Empowering NextGen Agriculture (AI-ENGAGE) initiative announced at the 2023 Quad Leaders’ Summit, Quad governments are deepening leading-edge collaborative research to harness artificial intelligence, robotics, and sensing, to transform agricultural approaches and empower farmers across the Indo-Pacific. The Quad announces an inaugural $7.5+ million in funding opportunities for joint research, and highlights the recent signing of a Memorandum of Cooperation among the four countries’ science agencies to connect research communities and advance shared research principles.
- The Quad recognizes the importance of advancing international efforts to achieve safe, secure and trustworthy artificial intelligence systems, including through the outcomes of the Hiroshima AI Process, GPAI New Delhi Ministerial Declaration 2023, and UN General Assembly resolution 78/625 on “Seizing the opportunities of safe, secure and trustworthy artificial intelligence systems for sustainable development.” The Quad seeks to further deepen international cooperation on artificial intelligence systems and interoperability among artificial intelligence governance frameworks.
- Quad countries, through the Standards Sub-Group, launched two Track 1.5 dialogues on AI and Advanced Communications Technologies to promote international standardization cooperation, including frameworks for AI conformity assessment.
Biotechnology
- The Quad partners look forward to launching the BioExplore Initiative – a joint effort supported by an initial $2 million in funding to use AI technology to study and analyze biological ecosystems across all four countries. This initiative will help advance our ability to discover and use the diverse capabilities found in living organisms to yield new products and innovations with the potential to diagnose and treat disease, develop resilient crops, generate clean energy, and much more. The initiative will also aim to build technological capacity across the Quad nations.
- This project will also be underpinned by the forthcoming Quad Principles for Research and Development Collaborations in Critical and Emerging Technologies, which advances sustainable, responsible, safe and secure collaborations in biotechnologies and other critical technologies among the Quad and across the region.
Semiconductors
- Quad Leaders welcome the finalization of a Memorandum of Cooperation for the Semiconductor Supply Chains Contingency Network to facilitate collaboration in addressing semiconductor supply chain risks.
The Quad Investors Network
The Quad Investors Network (QUIN) is a nonprofit initiative launched at the 2023 Quad Leaders’ Summit. The QUIN aims to accelerate investments in critical and emerging technologies across the Indo-Pacific region, bringing together investors, entrepreneurs, technologists, and public institutions from the Quad countries to support innovation that aligns with the Quad’s shared values and promotes economic growth, resilience, and regional stability. This year, the QUIN supported ten major strategic investments and partnerships across the Quad in the critical minerals, renewable energy, cybersecurity, and aerospace sectors.
- The QUIN has advanced additional frameworks to foster the development of new technologies and facilitate investment partnerships for emerging startups, including through finalizing a Memorandum of Understanding for the creation of a startup campus in Tokyo, supported by the QUIN and the Chiba Institute of Technology’s Center for Radical Transformation.
- The QUIN is also working to establish a new venture accelerator in Tokyo through a collaboration between the University of Tokyo, Northeastern University, and the QUIN. These collaborations will not only fuel technological advancements but also strengthen the economic ties among the Quad nations, contributing to a more integrated and resilient Indo-Pacific region.
- Finally, the QUIN developed a Quantum Center of Excellence, which produced a report this year highlighting ways each Quad country’s Quantum ecosystems can work together to collectively leverage capital and expertise.
CLIMATE AND CLEAN ENERGY
The Quad recognizes the existential threat climate change poses to the world, the Indo-Pacific, and in particular island nations in the Pacific and in the Indian Ocean region, and is taking ambitious steps to mitigate and adapt to the effects of climate change, promote clean energy innovation and adoption, and support sustainable development.
Climate Adaptation
- The Quad intends to expand its Early Warning Systems and the Climate Information Services Initiative (CIS), announced at the 2023 Leaders’ Summit. This will help improve Pacific Island countries’ access to high-quality climate data and services, and increase partners’ capacity to prepare for and respond to climate change and its impacts.
- The United States plans to provide 3D-printed automatic weather stations to the Pacific in 2025 to support local weather and climate forecasts, and also train experts in Fiji with the goal of operating a regional center to develop and deploy this technology.
- Australia is also strengthening Early Warning Systems through Weather Ready Pacific, a Pacific-led initiative supported by the Pacific Islands Forum Leaders in 2021 that drives and delivers on the EWS4ALL UN initiative in the Pacific.
- Japan is also enhancing cooperation with Pacific Island countries under its “Pacific Climate Resilience Initiative”, inter alia, by strengthening disaster risk reduction and preparedness through satellite technology and by promoting clean energy through capacity building and installation of renewable energies.
- The Quad also plans to train experts in Kiribati, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, and Vanuatu to better monitor and forecast flash floods, for timely and accurate warnings, reducing human and economic losses from flash floods.
Clean Energy
- Our countries intend to strengthen our cooperation to align policies, incentives, standards, and investments around creating high-quality, diversified clean energy supply chains that will enhance our collective energy security, create new economic opportunities across the region, and benefit local workers and communities around the world, particularly across the Indo-Pacific. We will work together, through policy and public finance, to operationalize our commitment to catalyzing complementary and high-standard private sector investment in allied and partner clean energy supply chains. We note the uniquely complementary capabilities Quad partners share across the battery supply chain, and pledge to focus near-term efforts on strengthening mineral production, recycling, and battery manufacturing across our respective industries.
- Quad Leaders announced a Quad Clean Energy Supply Chain Diversification Program last year, which aims to support the development of secure and diversified clean energy supply chains in the Indo-Pacific region. Australia will open applications for the Quad Clean Energy Supply Chains Diversification Program in November, providing AUD 50 million to support projects that develop and diversify solar panel, hydrogen electrolyzer and battery supply chains. Secure and diversified clean energy supply chains are an integral part of achieving the Indo-Pacific’s collective energy security, emissions reduction goals and transition to a net zero future.
- India commits to invest $2 million in new solar projects in Fiji, Comoros, Madagascar, and Seychelles.
- Japan has committed to $122 million grants and loans, both public and private, in renewable energy projects in the Indo-Pacific.
- The United States, through the DFC, has extended a $250 million loan to Tata Power Solar to construct a solar cell manufacturing facility and a $500 million loan to First Solar to construct and operate a solar module manufacturing facility in India, and continues to seek opportunities to mobilize private capital to solar, as well as wind, cooling, batteries, and critical minerals to expand capacity and diversify supply chains.
- The Quad announces an initiative to boost energy efficiency, including the deployment and manufacturing of affordable, high-efficiency, cooling systems, to enable climate-vulnerable communities to adapt to rising temperatures while simultaneously reducing strain on the electricity grid. The United States intends to invest an initial $1.25 million of technical assistance financing to this effort.
CYBER SECURITY
The Quad is working together to build a more resilient, secure, and complementary cyber security environment for Quad countries and partners.
- The Quad is constructively engaging on the Quad Action Plan to Protect Commercial Undersea Telecommunications Cables, to advance the Quad’s shared vision for future digital connectivity, global commerce, and prosperity.
- Quad countries are also partnering with software manufacturers, industry trade groups, and research centers to expand the Quad’s commitment to pursuing secure software development standards and certification, as endorsed in the Quad’s 2023 Secure Software Joint Principles.
- Quad partners will work to harmonize these standards to not only ensure that the development, procurement, and end-use of software for government networks is more secure, but that the cyber resilience of our supply chains, digital economies, and societies are collectively improved.
- Throughout this fall, each Quad country plans to host events to mark the annual Quad Cyber Challenge promoting responsible cyber ecosystems, public resources, and cybersecurity awareness. This year’s Cyber Challenge campaigns will focus on establishing career pathway programs to increase the number and diversity of global cybersecurity professionals, including increased participation by women, in this rapidly growing field. Last year’s Quad Cyber Challenge included over 85,000 participants across the Indo-Pacific region.
- Capacity building projects like the Quad Cyber Bootcamp and the international conference on cyber capacity building in the Philippines are important initiatives to enhance cybersecurity and workforce development in the Indo-Pacific region.
- The Quad is undertaking joint efforts to identify and mitigate vulnerabilities to national security and protection of critical infrastructure networks, and coordinate more closely including on policy responses to sharing of cyber threat information on significant cybersecurity incidents affecting shared priorities.
COUNTERING DISINFORMATION
The Quad is working together to foster a resilient information environment, including through its Countering Disinformation Working Group, by supporting media freedom and addressing foreign information manipulation and interference, including disinformation, which undermines trust and sows discord in the international community.
PEOPLE-TO-PEOPLE TIES
Quad countries are building enduring ties between their peoples. Stakeholders from Quad countries have participated in International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) and other exchanges, on topics related to cyber security, workforce development for critical and emerging technologies, women in STEM, government transparency and accountability, combating disinformation, and regional maritime governance.
The Quad Fellowship
- Together with the Institute of International Education, which leads implementation of the Quad Fellowship, Quad governments welcome the second cohort of Quad Fellows and the expansion of the program to include students from ASEAN countries for the first time. The Government of Japan is supporting the program to enable Quad Fellows to study in Japan. The Quad welcomes the generous support of private sector partners for the next cohort of fellows, including Google, the Pratt Foundation, and Western Digital.
- The Quad looks forward to the Quad Fellowship Summit in Washington, DC, in October, organized by the Institute of International Education.
Additional People-to-People Initiatives
- India announces a new initiative to award fifty Quad scholarships, worth $500,000, to students from the Indo-Pacific to pursue a 4-year undergraduate engineering program at a Government of India-funded technical institution.
SPACE
The Quad recognizes the essential contribution of space-related applications and technologies in the Indo-Pacific. The four countries plan to continue delivering Earth Observation data and other space-related applications to assist nations across the Indo-Pacific to strengthen climate early warning systems and better manage the impacts of extreme weather events.
- The Quad welcomes India’s establishment of a space-based web portal for Mauritius to support the concept of open science for space-based monitoring of extreme weather events and climate impact.
Space Situational Awareness Initiative
- Quad partners intend to share expertise and experience in space situational awareness (SSA), contributing to long-term sustainability of the space environment. Cooperation is intended to leverage SSA and space traffic coordination capabilities in the civil domain, including to help avoid collisions in outer space and manage debris.
COUNTERING TERRORISM
The Quad hosted its first Counter Terrorism Working Group (CTWG) in 2023 and will meet annually to discuss CT threats, Quad CT good practices, and ways the Quad can work together to mitigate acts of terrorism through information sharing, consequence management and strategic messaging. The Quad CTWG currently focuses on countering the use of unmanned aerial systems (C-UAS), chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear devices (CBRN), and the internet for terrorist purposes. The Quad CTWG discusses new CT lines of effort on which to collaborate, hosts technical workshops for establishing CT good practices, and explores ways to engage non-Quad members with Quad-established CT expertise.
13. The Wilmington Declaration Joint Statement from the Leaders of Australia, India, Japan, and the United States
"The Wilmington Declaration." Will it catch on?
Excerpts:
Over the past four years, Quad Leaders have met together six times, including twice virtually, and Quad Foreign Ministers have met eight times in the last five years. Quad country representatives meet together on a regular basis, at all levels, including among ambassadors across the four countries’ extensive diplomatic networks, to consult one another, exchange ideas to advance shared priorities, and deliver benefits with and for partners across the Indo-Pacific region. We welcome our Commerce and Industry ministers preparing to meet for the first time in the coming months. We also welcome the leaders of our Development Finance Institutions and Agencies deciding to meet to explore future investments by the four countries in the Indo-Pacific. Altogether, our four countries are cooperating at an unprecedented pace and scale.
Each of our governments has committed to working through our respective budgetary processes to secure robust funding for Quad priorities in the Indo-Pacific region to ensure an enduring impact. We intend to work with our legislatures to deepen interparliamentary exchanges, and encourage other stakeholders to deepen engagement with Quad counterparts.
We look forward to the next Quad Foreign Ministers’ meeting hosted by the United States in 2025, and the next Quad Leaders’ Summit hosted by India in 2025. The Quad is here to stay.
September 21, 2024
The Wilmington Declaration Joint Statement from the Leaders of Australia, India, Japan, and the United States
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2024/09/21/the-wilmington-declaration-joint-statement-from-the-leaders-of-australia-india-japan-and-the-united-states/
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Today, we—Prime Minister Anthony Albanese of Australia, Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, Prime Minister Kishida Fumio of Japan, and President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. of the United States—met for the fourth in-person Quad Leaders Summit, hosted by President Biden in Wilmington, Delaware.
Four years since elevating the Quad to a leader-level format, the Quad is more strategically aligned than ever before and is a force for good that delivers real, positive, and enduring impact for the Indo-Pacific. We celebrate the fact that over just four years, Quad countries have built a vital and enduring regional grouping that will buttress the Indo-Pacific for decades to come.
Anchored by shared values, we seek to uphold the international order based on the rule of law. Together we represent nearly two billion people and over one-third of global gross domestic product. We reaffirm our steadfast commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific that is inclusive and resilient. Through our cooperation, the Quad is harnessing all of our collective strengths and resources, from governments to the private sector to people-to-people relationships, to support the region’s sustainable development, stability, and prosperity by delivering tangible benefits to the people of the Indo-Pacific.
As four leading maritime democracies in the Indo-Pacific, we unequivocally stand for the maintenance of peace and stability across this dynamic region, as an indispensable element of global security and prosperity. We strongly oppose any destabilizing or unilateral actions that seek to change the status quo by force or coercion. We condemn recent illicit missile launches in the region that violate UN Security Council resolutions. We express serious concern over recent dangerous and aggressive actions in the maritime domain. We seek a region where no country dominates and no country is dominated—one where all countries are free from coercion, and can exercise their agency to determine their futures. We are united in our commitment to upholding a stable and open international system, with its strong support for human rights, the principle of freedom, rule of law, democratic values, sovereignty and territorial integrity, and peaceful settlement of disputes and prohibition on the threat or use of force in accordance with international law, including the UN Charter.
Reflecting the Vision Statement issued by Leaders at the 2023 Quad Summit, we are and will continue to be transparent in what we do. Respect for the leadership of regional institutions, including the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF), and the Indian Ocean Rim Association (IORA), is and will remain at the center of the Quad’s efforts.
A Global Force for Good
Health Security
The COVID-19 pandemic reminded the world how important health security is to our societies, our economies, and the stability of our region. In 2021 and 2022, the Quad came together to deliver more than 400 million safe and effective COVID-19 doses to Indo-Pacific countries and almost 800 million vaccines globally, and provided $5.6 billion to the COVAX Advance Market Commitment for vaccine supply to low and middle-income countries. In 2023, we announced the Quad Health Security Partnership, through which the Quad continues to deliver for partners across the region, including through the delivery of pandemic preparedness training.
In response to the current clade I mpox outbreak, as well as the ongoing clade II mpox outbreak, we plan to coordinate our efforts to promote equitable access to safe, effective, quality-assured mpox vaccines, including where appropriate expanding vaccine manufacturing in low and middle-income countries.
Today we are proud to announce the Quad Cancer Moonshot, a groundbreaking partnership to save lives in the Indo-Pacific region. Building on the Quad’s successful partnership during the COVID-19 pandemic, our collective investments to address cancer in the region, our scientific and medical capabilities, and contributions from our private and non-profit sectors, we will collaborate with partner nations to reduce the burden of cancer in the region.
The Quad Cancer Moonshot will focus initially on combatting cervical cancer—a preventable cancer that continues to claim too many lives—in the Indo-Pacific region, while laying the groundwork to address other forms of cancer as well. The United States intends to support this initiative, including through U.S. Navy medical trainings and professional exchanges around cervical cancer prevention in the region starting in 2025, and through U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) openness to finance eligible private sector-driven projects to prevent, diagnose, and treat cancer, including cervical cancer. Australia is announcing the expansion of the Elimination Partnership in the Indo-Pacific for Cervical Cancer Program (EPICC) with support of the Australian Government and the Minderoo Foundation to AUD 29.6 million, to cover up to eleven countries in the Indo-Pacific in helping advance the elimination of cervical cancer and support complementary initiatives focused on cancer prevention, diagnosis, and treatment. India commits to providing HPV sampling kits, detection kits, and cervical cancer vaccines worth $7.5 million to the Indo-Pacific region. India, through its $10 million commitment to the WHO’s Global Initiative on Digital Health, will offer technical assistance to interested countries in the Indo-Pacific region for the adoption and deployment of its Digital Public Infrastructure that helps in cancer screening and care. Japan is providing medical equipment, including CT and MRI scanners, and other assistance worth approximately $27 million, including in Cambodia, Vietnam, and Timor-Leste, and is contributing to international organizations such as the Gavi Vaccine Alliance. Quad partners also intend to work, within respective national contexts, to collaborate in advancing research and development in the area of cancer and to increase private sector and non-governmental sector activities in support of reducing the burden of cervical cancer in the region. We welcome a number of new, ambitious commitments from non-governmental institutions, including the Serum Institute of India, in partnership with Gavi, which will support orders of up to 40 million HPV vaccine doses, subject to necessary approvals, for the Indo-Pacific region, and which may be increased consistent with demand. We also welcome a new $100 million commitment from Women’s Health and Empowerment Network to address cervical cancer in Southeast Asia.
Altogether, our scientific experts assess that the Quad Cancer Moonshot will save hundreds of thousands of lives over the coming decades.
Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief (HADR)
Twenty years since the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, when the Quad first came together to surge humanitarian assistance, we continue to respond to the vulnerabilities caused by natural disasters in the Indo-Pacific. In 2022, the Quad established the “Quad Partnership on Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief in the Indo-Pacific” and signed Guidelines for the Quad Partnership on HADR in the Indo-Pacific, which enable Quad countries to rapidly coordinate in the face of natural disasters. We welcome Quad governments working to ensure readiness to rapidly respond, including through pre-positioning of essential relief supplies, in the event of a natural disaster; this effort extends from the Indian Ocean region, to Southeast Asia, to the Pacific.
In May 2024, following a tragic landslide in Papua New Guinea, Quad partners collectively contributed over $5 million in humanitarian assistance. Quad partners are working together to provide over $4 million in humanitarian assistance to support the people of Vietnam in light of the devastating consequences of Typhoon Yagi. The Quad continues to support partners in the region in their longer-term resiliency efforts.
Maritime Security
In 2022, we announced the Indo-Pacific Partnership for Maritime Domain Awareness (IPMDA) to offer near-real-time, integrated, and cost-effective maritime domain awareness information to partners in the region. Since then, in consultation with partners, we have successfully scaled the program across the Indo-Pacific region—through the Pacific Islands Forum Fisheries Agency, with partners in Southeast Asia, to the Information Fusion Center—Indian Ocean Region, Gurugram. In doing so, the Quad has helped well over two dozen countries access dark vessel maritime domain awareness data, so they can better monitor the activities in their exclusive economic zones—including unlawful activity. Australia commits to boosting its cooperation with the Pacific Islands Forum Fisheries Agency to enhance regional maritime domain awareness in the Pacific through satellite data, training, and capacity building.
Today we are announcing a new regional Maritime Initiative for Training in the Indo-Pacific (MAITRI), to enable our partners in the region to maximize tools provided through IPMDA and other Quad partner initiatives, to monitor and secure their waters, enforce their laws, and deter unlawful behavior. We look forward to India hosting the inaugural MAITRI workshop in 2025. Furthermore, we welcome the launch of a Quad maritime legal dialogue to support efforts to uphold the rules-based maritime order in the Indo-Pacific. In addition, Quad partners intend to layer new technology and data into IPMDA over the coming year, to continue to deliver cutting edge capability and information to the region.
We are also announcing today that the U.S. Coast Guard, Japan Coast Guard, Australian Border Force, and Indian Coast Guard, plan to launch a first-ever Quad-at-Sea Ship Observer Mission in 2025, to improve interoperability and advance maritime safety, and continuing with further missions in future years across the Indo-Pacific.
We also announce today the launch of a Quad Indo-Pacific Logistics Network pilot project, to pursue shared airlift capacity among our nations and leverage our collective logistics strengths, in order to support civilian response to natural disasters more rapidly and efficiently across the Indo-Pacific region.
Quality Infrastructure
The Quad remains committed to improving the region’s connectivity through the development of quality, resilient infrastructure.
We are pleased to announce the Quad Ports of the Future Partnership, which will harness the Quad’s expertise to support sustainable and resilient port infrastructure development across the Indo-Pacific, in collaboration with regional partners. In 2025, we intend to hold a Quad Regional Ports and Transportation Conference, hosted by India in Mumbai. Through this new partnership, Quad partners intend to coordinate, exchange information, share best practices with partners in the region, and leverage resources to mobilize government and private sector investments in quality port infrastructure across the Indo-Pacific region.
We applaud the expansion of the Quad Infrastructure Fellowships to more than 2,200 experts, and note that Quad partners have already provided well over 1,300 fellowships since the initiative was announced at last year’s Summit. We also appreciate the workshop organized by the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure in India, working to empower partners across the Indo-Pacific to strengthen power sector resilience.
Through the Quad Partnership for Cable Connectivity and Resilience, we continue to support and strengthen quality undersea cable networks in the Indo-Pacific, the capacity, durability, and reliability of which are inextricably linked to the security and prosperity of the region and the world. In support of these efforts, Australia launched the Cable Connectivity and Resilience Centre in July, which is delivering workshops and policy and regulatory assistance in response to requests from across the region. Japan will extend technical cooperation to improve public ICT infrastructure management capacity for an undersea cable in Nauru and Kiribati. The United States has conducted over 1,300 capacity building trainings for telecommunication officials and executives from 25 countries in the Indo-Pacific; today the U.S. announces its intent, working with Congress, to invest an additional $3.4 million to extend and expand this training program.
Investments in cable projects by Quad partners will help support all Pacific island countries in achieving primary telecommunication cable connectivity by the end of 2025. Since the last Quad Leaders’ Summit, Quad partners have committed over $140 million to undersea cable builds in the Pacific, alongside contributions from other likeminded partners. Complementing these investments in new undersea cables, India has commissioned a feasibility study to examine expansion of undersea cable maintenance and repair capabilities in the Indo-Pacific.
We reaffirm our support for the Pacific Quality Infrastructure Principles, which are an expression of Pacific voices on infrastructure.
We underscore our commitment to an inclusive, open, sustainable, fair, safe, reliable and secure digital future to advance our shared prosperity and sustainable development across the Indo-Pacific. In this context, we welcome the Quad Principles for Development and Deployment of Digital Public Infrastructure.
Critical and Emerging Technologies
Today, we are proud to announce an ambitious expansion of our partnership to deliver trusted technology solutions to the broader Indo-Pacific region.
Last year, Quad partners launched a landmark initiative to deploy the first Open Radio Access Network (RAN) in the Pacific, in Palau, to support a secure, resilient, and interconnected telecommunications ecosystem. Since then, the Quad has pledged approximately $20 million to this effort.
Quad partners also welcome the opportunity to explore additional Open RAN projects in Southeast Asia. We plan to expand support for ongoing Open RAN field trials and the Asia Open RAN Academy (AORA) in the Philippines, building on the initial $8 million in support that the United States and Japan pledged earlier this year. The United States also plans to invest over $7 million to support the global expansion of AORA, including through establishing a first-of-its-kind Open RAN workforce training initiative at scale in South Asia, in partnership with Indian institutions.
Quad partners will also explore collaborating with the Tuvalu Telecommunications Corporation to ensure the country’s readiness for nationwide 5G deployment.
We remain committed to advancing our cooperation on semiconductors through better leveraging of our complementary strengths to realize a diversified and competitive market and enhance resilience of Quad’s semiconductor supply chains. We welcome a Memorandum of Cooperation between Quad countries for the Semiconductor Supply Chains Contingency Network.
Through the Advancing Innovations for Empowering NextGen Agriculture (AI-ENGAGE) initiative announced at last year’s Summit, our governments are deepening leading-edge collaborative research to harness artificial intelligence, robotics, and sensing to transform agricultural approaches and empower farmers across the Indo-Pacific. We are pleased to announce an inaugural $7.5+ million in funding opportunities for joint research, and welcome the recent signing of a Memorandum of Cooperation between our science agencies to connect our research communities and advance shared research principles.
The United States, Australia, India, and Japan look forward to launching the Quad BioExplore Initiative—a funded mechanism that will support joint AI-driven exploration of diverse non-human biological data across all four countries.
This project will also be underpinned by the forthcoming Quad Principles for Research and Development Collaborations in Critical and Emerging Technologies.
Climate and Clean Energy
As we underscore the severe economic, social, and environmental consequences posed by the climate crisis, we continue to work together with Indo-Pacific partners, including through Quad Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation Package (Q-CHAMP), to enhance climate and clean energy cooperation as well as promote adaptation and resilience. We emphasize the significant benefits of transitioning to a clean energy economy for our people, our planet, and our shared prosperity. Our countries intend to strengthen our cooperation to align policies, incentives, standards, and investments around creating high-quality, diversified clean energy supply chains that will enhance our collective energy security, create new economic opportunities across the region, and benefit local workers and communities around the world, particularly across the Indo-Pacific.
We will work together, through policy and public finance, to operationalize our commitment to catalyzing complementary and high-standard private sector investment in allied and partner clean energy supply chains. To this end, Australia will open applications for the Quad Clean Energy Supply Chains Diversification Program in November, providing AUD 50 million to support projects that develop and diversify solar panel, hydrogen electrolyzer and battery supply chains in the Indo-Pacific. India commits to invest $2 million in new solar projects in Fiji, Comoros, Madagascar, and Seychelles. Japan has committed to $122 million grants and loans in renewable energy projects in Indo-Pacific countries. The United States, through DFC, will continue to seek opportunities to mobilize private capital to solar, as well as wind, cooling, batteries, and critical minerals to expand and diversify supply chains.
We are pleased to announce a focused Quad effort to boost energy efficiency, including the deployment and manufacturing of high-efficiency affordable, cooling systems to enable climate-vulnerable communities to adapt to rising temperatures while simultaneously reducing strain on the electricity grid.
We jointly affirm our commitment to addressing the challenges posed by climate change and ensure the resilience and sustainability of port infrastructure. Quad partners will leverage our learning and expertise to forge a path towards sustainable and resilient port infrastructure, including through the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure (CDRI).
Cyber
In the face of a deteriorating security environment in the cyber domain, Quad countries intend to enhance our cybersecurity partnership to address common threats posed by state-sponsored actors, cybercriminals, and other non-state malicious actors. Our countries commit to taking concrete steps to increase our collective network defense and advance technical capabilities through greater threat information sharing and capacity building. We plan to coordinate joint efforts to identify vulnerabilities, protect national security networks and critical infrastructure networks, and coordinate more closely including on policy responses to significant cybersecurity incidents affecting the Quad’s shared priorities.
Quad countries are also partnering with software manufacturers, industry trade groups, and research centers to expand our commitmentto pursuing secure software development standards and certification, as endorsed in the Quad’s 2023 Secure Software Joint Principles. We will work to harmonize these standards to not only ensure that the development, procurement, and end-use of software for government networks is more secure, but that the cyber resilience of our supply chains, digital economies, and societies are collectively improved. Throughout this fall, Quad countries each plan to host campaigns to mark the annual Quad Cyber Challenge promoting responsible cyber ecosystems, public resources, and cybersecurity awareness. We are constructively engaging on the Quad Action Plan to Protect Commercial Undersea Telecommunications Cables, developed by the Quad Senior Cyber Group, as a complementary effort to the Quad Partnership for Cable Connectivity and Resilience. Our coordinated actions to protect global telecommunications infrastructure as guided by the Action Plan will advance our shared vision for future digital connectivity, global commerce, and prosperity.
Space
We recognize the essential contribution of space-related applications and technologies in the Indo-Pacific. Our four countries intend to continue delivering Earth Observation data and other space-related applications to assist nations across the Indo-Pacific to strengthen climate early warning systems and better manage the impacts of extreme weather events. In this context, we welcome India’s establishment of a space-based web portal for Mauritius, to support the concept of open science for space-based monitoring of extreme weather events and climate impact.
Quad Investors Network (QUIN)
We welcome private sector initiatives—including the Quad Investors Network (QUIN), which facilitates investments in strategic technologies, including clean energy, semiconductors, critical minerals, and quantum. The QUIN is mobilizing a number of investments to promote supply chain resilience, advance joint research and development, commercialize new technologies, and invest in our future workforce.
People-to-People Initiatives
The Quad is committed to strengthening the deep and enduring ties between our people, and among our partners. Through the Quad Fellowship, we are building a network of the next generation of science, technology, and policy leaders. Together with the Institute of International Education, which leads implementation of the Quad Fellowship, Quad governments welcome the second cohort of Quad Fellows and the expansion of the program to include students from ASEAN countries for the first time. The Government of Japan is supporting the program to enable Quad Fellows to study in Japan. The Quad welcomes the generous support of private sector partners for the next cohort of fellows, including Google, the Pratt Foundation, and Western Digital.
India is pleased to announce a new initiative to award fifty Quad scholarships, worth $500,000, to students from the Indo-Pacific to pursue a 4-year undergraduate engineering program at a Government of India-funded technical institution.
Working Together to Address Regional and Global Issues
Today we reaffirm our consistent and unwavering support for ASEAN centrality and unity. We continue to support implementation of the ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific (AOIP) and are committed to ensuring the Quad’s work is aligned with ASEAN’s principles and priorities.
We underscore ASEAN’s regional leadership role, including in the East Asia Summit, the region’s premier leader-led forum for strategic dialogue, and the ASEAN Regional Forum. As comprehensive strategic partners of ASEAN, our four countries intend to continue to strengthen our respective relationships with ASEAN and seek opportunities for greater Quad collaboration in support of the AOIP.
We recommit to working in partnership with Pacific island countries to achieve shared aspirations and address shared challenges. We reaffirm our support for Pacific regional institutions that have served the region well over many years, with the PIF as the region’s premier political and economic policy organization, and warmly welcome Tonga’s leadership as the current PIF Chair in 2024-2025. We continue to support the objectives of the 2050 Strategy for the Blue Pacific Continent. We and our governments will continue to listen to and be guided at every step by Pacific priorities, including climate action, ocean health, resilient infrastructure, maritime security and financial integrity. In particular, we acknowledge climate change remains the single greatest threat to the livelihoods, security and wellbeing of the peoples of the Pacific and applaud Pacific island countries’ global leadership on climate action.
We remain committed to strengthening cooperation in the Indian Ocean region. We strongly support IORA as the Indian Ocean region’s premier forum for addressing the region’s challenges. We recognize India’s leadership in finalizing the IORA Outlook on the Indo-Pacific (IOIP) and express our support for its implementation. We thank Sri Lanka for its continued leadership as IORA Chair through this year and look forward to India’s assuming the IORA Chair in 2025.
As Leaders, we are steadfast in our conviction that international law, including respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, and the maintenance of peace, safety, security and stability in the maritime domain, underpin the sustainable development, and prosperity of the Indo-Pacific. We emphasize the importance of adherence to international law, particularly as reflected in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), to address challenges to the global maritime rules-based order, including with respect to maritime claims. We are seriously concerned about the situation in the East and South China Seas. We continue to express our serious concern about the militarization of disputed features, and coercive and intimidating maneuvers in the South China Sea. We condemn the dangerous use of coast guard and maritime militia vessels, including increasing use of dangerous maneuvers. We also oppose efforts to disrupt other countries’ offshore resource exploitation activities.We reaffirm that maritime disputes must be resolved peacefully and in accordance with international law, as reflected in UNCLOS. We re-emphasize the importance of maintaining and upholding freedom of navigation and overflight, other lawful uses of the sea, and unimpeded commerce consistent with international law. We re-emphasize the universal and unified character of UNCLOS and reaffirm that UNCLOS sets out the legal framework within which all activities in the oceans and the seas must be carried out. We underscore that the 2016 Arbitral Award on the South China Sea is a significant milestone and the basis for peacefully resolving disputes between the parties.
Together, with our global and regional partners, we continue to support international institutions and initiatives that underpin global peace, prosperity and sustainable development. We reiterate our unwavering support for the UN Charter and the three pillars of the UN system. In consultation with our partners, we will work collectively to address attempts to unilaterally undermine the integrity of the UN, its Charter, and its agencies. We will reform the UN Security Council, recognizing the urgent need to make it more representative, inclusive, transparent, efficient, effective, democratic and accountable through expansion in permanent and non-permanent categories of membership of the UN Security Council. This expansion of permanent seats should include representation for Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean in a reformed Security Council.
We stand for adherence to international law and respect for principles of the UN Charter, including territorial integrity, sovereignty of all states, and peaceful resolution of disputes. We express our deepest concern over the war raging in Ukraine including the terrible and tragic humanitarian consequences. Each of us has visited Ukraine since the war began, and seen this first-hand; we reiterate the need for a comprehensive, just, and lasting peace in line with international law, consistent with the purposes and principles of the UN Charter, including respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity. We also note the negative impacts of the war in Ukraine with regard to global food and energy security, especially for developing and least developed countries. In the context of this war, we share the view that the use, or threat of use, of nuclear weapons is unacceptable. We underscore the importance of upholding international law, and in line with the UN Charter, reiterate that all states must refrain from the threat of or use of force against the territorial integrity and sovereignty or political independence of any state.
We condemn North Korea’s destabilizing ballistic missile launches and its continued pursuit of nuclear weapons in violation of multiple UN Security Council resolutions (UNSCRs). These launches pose a grave threat to international peace and stability. We urge North Korea to abide by all its obligations under the UNSCRs, refrain from further provocations and engage in substantive dialogue. We reaffirm our commitment to the complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula consistent with relevant UNSCRs and call on all countries to fully implement these UNSCRs. We stress the need to prevent any proliferation of nuclear and missile technologies related to North Korea in the region and beyond. We express our grave concern over North Korea’s use of proliferation networks, malicious cyber activity and workers abroad to fund its unlawful weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programs. In that context, we urge all UN Member States to abide by the relevant UNSCRs including the prohibition on the transfer to North Korea or procurement from North Korea of all arms and related materiel. We express deep concern about countries that are deepening military cooperation with North Korea, which directly undermines the global nonproliferation regime. As the mandate of the UN Panel of Experts tasked with monitoring violations of North Korea-related UNSCR sanctions was not renewed, we reiterate our commitment to continued implementation of the relevant UNSCRs which remain in full force. We reconfirm the necessity of immediate resolution of the abductions issue.
We remain deeply concerned by the worsening political, security and humanitarian situation in Myanmar, including in Rakhine State, and again call for an immediate cessation of violence, the release of all those unjustly and arbitrarily detained, safe and unhindered humanitarian access, resolution of the crisis through constructive and inclusive dialogue among all stakeholders, and a return to the path of inclusive democracy. We reaffirm our strong support for ASEAN-led efforts, including the work of the ASEAN Chair and the Special Envoy of the ASEAN Chair on Myanmar. We call for full implementation of all commitments under the ASEAN Five-Point Consensus. The ongoing conflict and instability have serious implications for the region, including increases in transnational crime such as cybercrime, the illegal drug trade, and human trafficking. We restate our appeal to all States to prevent the flow of arms and dual-use material, including jet fuel. We remain resolute in our support for the people of Myanmar and commit to continuing to work with all stakeholders in a pragmatic and constructive way, to find a sustainable solution to the crisis in a process which is led by the people of Myanmar and returns Myanmar to the path of democracy.
We call upon all States to contribute to the safe, peaceful, responsible, and sustainable use of outer space. We remain committed to fostering international cooperation and transparency, as well as confidence-building measures with the goal of improving the security of outer space for all States. We reaffirm the importance of upholding the existing international legal framework for outer space activities, including the Outer Space Treaty, and the obligation of all States Parties to the Treaty not to place in orbit around the Earth any objects carrying nuclear weapons or any other kinds of weapons of mass destruction, install such weapons on celestial bodies, or station such weapons in outer space in any other manner.
The Quad reaffirms its commitment to fostering a resilient information environment including through its Countering Disinformation Working Group by supporting media freedom and addressing foreign information manipulation and interference, including disinformation, which undermines trust and sows discord in the international community. We recognize these tactics are intended to interfere with domestic and international interests, and we are committed, together with our regional partners, to leverage our collective expertise and capacity to respond. We reaffirm our commitment to respect international human rights law, strengthen civil society, support media freedom, address online harassment and abuse, including technology-facilitated gender-based violence, and counter unethical practices.
We unequivocally condemn terrorism and violent extremism in all its forms and manifestations, including cross-border terrorism. We are committed to international cooperation and will work with our regional partners in a comprehensive and sustained manner to strengthen their capability to prevent, detect and respond to threats posed by terrorism and violent extremism, including threats posed by the use of new and emerging technologies for terrorist purposes, consistent with international law. We are committed to working together to promote accountability for the perpetrators of such terrorist attacks. We reiterate our condemnation of terrorist attacks including the 26/11 attacks in Mumbai and in Pathankot, and our commitment to pursuing designations, as appropriate, by the UN Security Council 1267 Sanctions Committee. We welcome the constructive discussions held at the first Quad Working Group on Counter-Terrorism and the fourth tabletop exercise in Honolulu last year, and look forward to Japan hosting the next meeting and tabletop exercise in November 2024.
We share great interest in achieving peace and stability in the Middle East. We unequivocally condemn the terror attacks on October 7, 2023. The large-scale loss of civilian lives and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza is unacceptable. We affirm the imperative of securing the release of all hostages held by Hamas, and emphasize that the deal to release hostages would bring an immediate and prolonged ceasefire in Gaza. We underscore the urgent need to significantly increase deliveries of life-saving humanitarian assistance throughout Gaza as well as the crucial need to prevent regional escalation. We urge all parties to comply with international law, including international humanitarian law, as applicable. We welcome UNSCR S/RES/2735 (2024), and strongly urge all parties concerned to work immediately and steadily toward the release of all hostages and an immediate ceasefire. We call on all parties to take every feasible step to protect the lives of civilians including aid workers, and facilitate the rapid, safe and unimpeded humanitarian relief to civilians. We also encourage other countries, including those in the Indo-Pacific, to increase their support in order to address the dire humanitarian need on the ground. We underscore that the future recovery and reconstruction of Gaza should be supported by the international community. We remain committed to a sovereign, viable and independent Palestinian state taking into account Israel’s legitimate security concerns as part of a two-state solution that enables both Israelis and Palestinians to live in a just, lasting, and secure peace. Any unilateral actions that undermine the prospect of a two-state solution, including Israeli expansion of settlements and violent extremism on all sides, must end. We underscore the need to prevent the conflict from escalating and spilling over in the region.
We condemn the ongoing attacks perpetrated by the Houthis and their supporters against international and commercial vessels transiting through the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, which are destabilizing the region and impeding navigational rights and freedoms and trade flows, and jeopardize the safety of vessels and people on board including sailors.
We reaffirm our commitment to the implementation of the 2030 Agenda and the achievement of its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). We underscore the importance of achieving the SDGs in a comprehensive manner without selectively prioritizing a narrow set of such goals, and reaffirm that the UN has a central role in supporting countries in their implementation. With six years left, we remain steadfast in our commitment to the full implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and accelerating progress toward all the SDGs in a comprehensive manner that is balanced across three dimensions – economic, social and environmental. From global health to sustainable development and climate change, the global community benefits when all stakeholders have the opportunity to contribute to addressing these challenges. We affirm our commitment to contributing to and implementing the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) Agenda and to achieving gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls. We underscore our commitment to strongly engaging constructively in the discussion on advancing sustainable development, including at the Summit of the Future. The Quad continues to realize a safe and secure world where human rights and human dignity are protected, based on the central premise of the SDGs: “Leave no one behind.”
We, the Quad Leaders, remain dedicated to working in partnership with Indo-Pacific countries in deciding our future and shaping the region we all want to live in.
Enduring Partners for the Indo-Pacific
Over the past four years, Quad Leaders have met together six times, including twice virtually, and Quad Foreign Ministers have met eight times in the last five years. Quad country representatives meet together on a regular basis, at all levels, including among ambassadors across the four countries’ extensive diplomatic networks, to consult one another, exchange ideas to advance shared priorities, and deliver benefits with and for partners across the Indo-Pacific region. We welcome our Commerce and Industry ministers preparing to meet for the first time in the coming months. We also welcome the leaders of our Development Finance Institutions and Agencies deciding to meet to explore future investments by the four countries in the Indo-Pacific. Altogether, our four countries are cooperating at an unprecedented pace and scale.
Each of our governments has committed to working through our respective budgetary processes to secure robust funding for Quad priorities in the Indo-Pacific region to ensure an enduring impact. We intend to work with our legislatures to deepen interparliamentary exchanges, and encourage other stakeholders to deepen engagement with Quad counterparts.
We look forward to the next Quad Foreign Ministers’ meeting hosted by the United States in 2025, and the next Quad Leaders’ Summit hosted by India in 2025. The Quad is here to stay.
14. Israel’s Pager Attacks Have Changed the World
"— in peacetime, wartime and the ever expanding gray zone in between."
Excerpts:
Though the deadly operations were stunning, none of the elements used to carry them out were particularly new. The tactics employed by Israel, which has neither confirmed nor denied any role, to hijack an international supply chain and embed plastic explosives in Hezbollah devices have been used for years. What’s new is that Israel put them together in such a devastating and extravagantly public fashion, bringing into stark relief what the future of great power competition will look like — in peacetime, wartime and the ever expanding gray zone in between.
Opinion
Guest Essay
Israel’s Pager Attacks Have Changed the World
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/22/opinion/israel-pager-attacks-supply-chain.html
Sept. 22, 2024, 6:00 a.m. ET
Credit...Mohammad Zaatari/Associated Press
By Bruce Schneier
Mr. Schneier is a security technologist and a lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School.
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Israel’s brazen attacks on Hezbollah last week, in which hundreds of pagers and two-way radios exploded and killed at least 37 people, graphically illustrated a threat that cybersecurity experts have been warning about for years: Our international supply chains for computerized equipment leave us vulnerable. And we have no good means to defend ourselves.
Though the deadly operations were stunning, none of the elements used to carry them out were particularly new. The tactics employed by Israel, which has neither confirmed nor denied any role, to hijack an international supply chain and embed plastic explosives in Hezbollah devices have been used for years. What’s new is that Israel put them together in such a devastating and extravagantly public fashion, bringing into stark relief what the future of great power competition will look like — in peacetime, wartime and the ever expanding gray zone in between.
The targets won’t just be terrorists. Our computers are vulnerable, and increasingly, so are our cars, our refrigerators, our home thermostats and many other useful things in our orbits. Targets are everywhere.
The core component of the operation — implanting plastic explosives in pagers and radios — has been a terrorist risk since Richard Reid, the so-called shoe bomber, tried to ignite some on an airplane in 2001. That’s what all of those airport scanners are designed to detect — both the ones you see at security checkpoints and the ones that later scan your luggage. Even a small amount can do an impressive degree of damage.
The second component, assassination by personal device, isn’t new, either. Israel used this tactic against a Hamas bomb maker in 1996 and a Fatah activist in 2000. Both were killed by remotely detonated booby-trapped cellphones.
The final and more logistically complex piece of Israel’s plan — attacking an international supply chain to compromise equipment at scale — is something that the United States has done itself, though for different purposes. The National Security Agency has intercepted communications equipment in transit and modified it, not for destructive purposes but for eavesdropping. We know from a Snowden document that the agency did this to a Cisco router destined for a Syrian telecommunications company. Presumably, this wasn’t the agency’s only operation of this type.
Creating a front company to fool victims isn’t even a new twist. Israel reportedly created a shell company to produce and sell explosive-laden devices to Hezbollah. In 2019, the F.B.I. created a company that sold supposedly secure cellphones to criminals — not to assassinate them, but to eavesdrop on and then arrest them.
The bottom line: Our supply chains are vulnerable, which means that we are vulnerable. Anyone — any country, any group, any individual — that interacts with a high-tech supply chain can potentially subvert the equipment passing through it. It could be subverted to eavesdrop. It could be subverted to degrade or fail on command. And, although it’s harder, it can be subverted to kill.
Personal devices connected to the internet — and countries in which they are in high use, such as the United States — are especially at risk. In 2007, the Idaho National Laboratory demonstrated that a cyberattack could cause a high-voltage generator to explode. In 2010, a computer virus believed to have been developed jointly by the United States and Israel destroyed centrifuges at an Iranian nuclear facility. A 2017 dump of C.I.A. documents included statements about the possibility of remotely hacking cars, which WikiLeaks asserted can be used to carry out “nearly undetectable assassinations.” This isn’t just theoretical: In 2015, a Wired reporter allowed hackers to remotely take over his car while he was driving it. They disabled the engine while he was on a highway.
The world has already begun to adjust to this threat. Many countries are increasingly wary of buying communications equipment from countries they don’t trust. The United States and others are banning large routers from the Chinese company Huawei because we fear that they could be used for eavesdropping and — even worse — disabled remotely in a time of escalating hostilities. In 2019 there was a minor panic over Chinese-made subway cars that could possibly have been modified to eavesdrop on their riders.
It’s not just finished equipment that is under the scanner. More than a decade ago, the U.S. military investigated the security risks of using Chinese parts in its equipment. In 2018, a Bloomberg report revealed U.S. investigators had accused China of modifying computer chips to steal information.
It’s not obvious how to defend against these and similar attacks. Our high-tech supply chains are complex and international. It didn’t raise any red flags to Hezbollah that the group’s pagers came from a Hungary-based company that sourced them from Taiwan, because that sort of thing is perfectly normal. Most of the electronics Americans buy come from overseas, including our iPhones, whose parts come from dozens of countries before being pieced together primarily in China.
That’s a hard problem to fix. We can’t imagine Washington passing a law requiring iPhones to be made entirely in the United States. Labor costs are too high, and our country doesn’t have the domestic capacity to make these things. Our supply chains are deeply, inexorably international, and changing that would require bringing global economies back to the 1980s.
So what happens now? As for Hezbollah, its leaders and operatives will no longer be able to trust equipment connected to a network — very likely one of the primary goals of the attacks. And the world will have to wait to see if there are any long-term effects of this attack, or how the group will respond.
But now that the line has been crossed, other countries will almost certainly start to consider this sort of tactic as within bounds. It could be deployed against a military during a war, or against civilians in the run-up to a war. And developed countries like the United States will be especially vulnerable, simply because of the sheer number of vulnerable devices we have.
More on the attacks in Lebanon
Opinion | Michael Walzer
Israel’s Pager Bombs Have No Place in a Just War
Sept. 21, 2024
Opinion | Thomas L. Friedman
America’s Role in the World Is Hard. It Just Got Much Harder.
Sept. 17, 2024
Opinion | Ezra Klein
Israel vs. Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran — and Itself
Sept. 20, 2024
Bruce Schneier is a security technologist and a lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School. His new book is “A Hacker’s Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society’s Rules, and How to Bend Them Back.”
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15. Who's Afraid of Vladimir Putin? by Sir Lawrence Freedman
Excerpts:
Escalation is not something to fear in the future but something that has already occurred. Russia escalated when it launched its full-scale invasion and then escalated more in its conduct as it has sought to punish Ukraine for its defiance. It escalated when it deliberately created an energy crisis to coerce the West into abandoning its support for Ukraine and has now moved on to forms of sabotage and subversion, as well as backing countries hostile to the West in their conflicts. The West has responded in its own way, largely with economic sanctions and defensive measures designed to increase resilience. More publicity is being given to Russian activities to increase awareness. All this has moved relations with Russia to a new stage, a form of cold war, with much activity just below the threshold of direct hostilities, but an increasing risk that it might turn hot. We need to be worried as much about what Putin is doing now as about what he might do.
After the US elections there will be a strategic reset of some sort. Naturally most speculation surrounds Trump and his claims that he can repair relations with Putin and end the war, something which he would find to be more difficult than he assumes. Harris’s policies get less attention because she is committed to backing Ukraine against Russian aggression and so she represents continuity. But if she becomes president she will also faces new challenges, with continuing questions about how best to support Ukraine against the backdrop of a wounded Russia lashing out where it can.
Who's Afraid of Vladimir Putin?
On taking threats seriously
https://samf.substack.com/p/whos-afraid-of-vladimir-putin?r=7i07&utm
Lawrence Freedman
Sep 22, 2024
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On 13 September 2024 President Vladimir Putin was asked by Russian state media about the possibility that Ukraine would be allowed ‘to strike targets deep inside Russia using Western long-range weapons.’ Putin’s answer was typically belligerent. The issue, he noted, was not whether Ukraine would be able to hit Russian territory. It had been doing that for some time. The vital point was that Ukrainians could not on their own use ‘cutting-edge high-precision long-range systems supplied by the West’ because they need ‘intelligence data from satellites’, and, even more important, ‘only NATO military personnel can assign flight missions to these missile systems.’
He continued:
‘If this decision is made, it will mean nothing short of direct involvement — it will mean that NATO countries, the United States and European countries are parties to the war in Ukraine. This will mean their direct involvement in the conflict, and it will clearly change the very essence, the very nature of the conflict dramatically.’
‘This will mean that NATO countries — the United States and European countries — are at war with Russia. And if this is the case, then, bearing in mind the change in the essence of the conflict, we will make appropriate decisions in response to the threats that will be posed to us.’
This led to alarmed headlines about threats of nuclear escalation and earnest warnings about the need to take Putin’s threats seriously, including from Josep Borrell, the EU’s chief diplomat. Putin is after all leader of a nuclear power currently engaged in a desperate war. In such fraught circumstances ill-considered decisions could lead to disaster. On 21 September the nuclear message was underlined by a test firing of its newest ICBM, the RS-28 Sarmat, although the effect was diminished when the missile exploded in its silo, destroying the test site.
Putin’s warning was timed to influence a meeting the next day at the White House between President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Keir Starmer, with some reports suggesting that a policy change might be forthcoming. As no decision on permitting Ukraine to strike deep into Russia was announced after this meeting, perhaps Putin’s threat had worked. This reinforced a long-standing complaint from supporters that Biden took the risks of a wider war with Russia far too seriously, with the paradoxical consequence of making one more likely. For if Ukraine loses its war because of Western timidity, goes the argument, then an emboldened Russia would soon turn against NATO countries.
Two individuals close to Donald Trump - the unlikely duo of Donald Trump Jr and Robert Kennedy Jr – wrote in The Hill to make the case for taking Putin’s warning very seriously indeed. A decision to allow ‘Ukraine to use NATO-provided long-range precision weapons against targets deep inside Russia’ would ‘put the world at greater risk of nuclear conflagration than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis.’ They accepted Putin’s claim that this would be interpreted as an ‘act of war’. Those who believe Putin is bluffing, noting the many red lines that have already passed, were dismissed as complacent about the dangers inherent in continually ‘goading the bear’, and ‘mistaking restraint for weakness’ (as if restraint has thus far been a feature of Putin’s war). They quoted President Kennedy from 1963:
‘Nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war.’
While the sceptics note the number of times that Putin has issued threats that led to nothing, Trump and Kennedy took each past utterance as an important signal. They made an astonishing claim:
‘This game of nuclear “chicken” has gone far enough. There is no remaining step between firing U.S. missiles deep into Russian territory and a nuclear exchange. We cannot get any closer to the brink than this.’
With no ‘vital American interest at stake’ and a claim that Russian war aims amount to no more than ‘Ukrainian neutrality and a halt to NATO’s eastward expansion’ they argued for ‘de-escalation’ and ‘finding a diplomatic off-ramp to a war that should never have been allowed to take place.’ They concluded:
‘Former President Donald Trump has vowed to end this war, but by the time he takes office, it might be too late. We need to demand, right now, that Harris and President Biden reverse their insane war agenda and open direct negotiations with Moscow.’
While the duo might have been reading what Putin says about escalation, they appeared to have ignored everything he says about negotiations, including his regular references to ‘new territorial realities’. At any rate with the Biden administration neither escalating nor negotiating the Juniors are left with an analysis that is currently looking a tad over-heated.
All this confirms what the Ukrainians already know – that however frustrated they might be with Biden that will be nothing compared to the trials that await them should Trump return to the White House. In the former president’s debate with Kamala Harris, when asked by moderator David Muir to clarify his position (did he want Ukraine to win, yes or no), he replied:
‘I think it's in the U.S. best interest to get this war finished and just get it done. All right. Negotiate a deal. Because we have to stop all of these human lives from being destroyed.’
Which was at least succinct compared to the preceding jumble of words. Harris used her response to suggest that if Trump were president, ‘Putin would be sitting in Kyiv right now’ adding that that this is why ‘our NATO allies are so thankful’ that he is not, and noting,
‘how quickly you would give up for the sake of favor and what you think is a friendship with what is known to be a dictator who would eat you for lunch.’
Just how much Trump might be prepared to give to Putin was illustrated a couple of days after the debate.
Speaking on the Shawn Ryan Show, Vice-Presidential candidate J. D. Vance, described Trump’s likely peace plan:
“I think what this looks like is Trump sits down, he says to the Russians, the Ukrainians, the Europeans: You guys need to figure out what does a peaceful settlement look like? And what it probably looks like is the current line of demarcation between Russia and Ukraine, that becomes like a demilitarized zone.’
He added that the proposed demilitarized zone, would be ‘heavily fortified so the Russians don’t invade again’ - an interesting view of demilitarisation, and perhaps not fully grasping just how much ground would need to be covered by these fortifications. The rump Ukraine would remain an independent sovereign state, so Russia would still need to be reassured by a ‘guarantee of neutrality’ from Ukraine, as if it had been the victim of past Ukrainian aggression. ‘It doesn’t join NATO, it doesn’t join some of these sort of allied institutions. I think that’s ultimately what this looks like.’
While this plan is obviously close to what the Russians want it would still probably not satisfy Putin. He has laid claim to land that Ukrainian forces still hold. Once on a negotiating roll he would see if Trump would meet all his demands, always in the name of peace. Vance wasn’t asked, so he didn’t say how President Zelensky was going to be persuaded to agree to all of this. Even knowing that this would mean the loss of all US aid, the Ukrainian people would still most likely reject capitulation of this sort. Pressure on Kyiv has always been explicit in past discussions of Trump’s plan but at least at times combined with suggestions that support to Ukraine might be increased if Putin was being, even in Trump’s eyes, unreasonable. Vance did not raise that possibility.
Assessing Putin’s Threat
Putin has been making similar threats on a regular basis since 24 February 2022, the day he announced the full-scale invasion. As discussed many times, (for example here), red lines have come and gone and each time Putin has stayed well clear of nuclear escalation. He usually sounds menacing without being at all specific about what he has in mind. To say, as he did on this occasion, that his decision will be ‘appropriate’ tells us nothing, other than he is not sure what to do. At any rate I doubt that if this particular line is to be passed he will be notified in advance. He may well have to decide on a response after the first targets have been hit.
Moreover, this red line has long been passed. The UK/France Storm Shadow/Scalp and the US ATACMs have been in use since 2023 - just not against targets deep into Russia. If Putin is convinced that they can only be used with Western help then that help has been provided and those countries are already direct participants in the war. My own view remains as it has been from the start of the war that the only scenario likely to trigger serious escalation is the one about which Putin has been most explicit - in which forces from NATO countries fight side by side with Ukrainian forces. The problem for Putin is that his tendency to make menacing noises about developments far less substantial has undermined the credibility of his threats.
This is not to say, however, that the Biden Administration does not worry about what Putin might do next. After a recent opportunity to talk to US government officials in Washington, my conclusion was that there are worries about the Russian responses, although not about nuclear use, and that at the heart of the disagreements with Kyiv was a wider anxiety about Ukrainian strategic decision-making and whether long-range strikes are the best use of scarce resources.
The starting point is that the amount of support being provided to Ukraine, including long-range systems, will continue to be substantial but also limited. The shortages with which Ukraine still has to cope are disappointing given the relief that accompanied Congress’s eventual agreement to a new funding package for Ukraine last April after months of delay. Not only have the authorised funds been drawn down only slowly there is now concern about more delays. It is still uncertain whether a continuing resolution will be passed by Congress by 30 September to avoid a government shutdown. If that can be done then the administration hopes that the resolution will allow a one-year extension of the $6 billion available to support military aid for Ukraine. Otherwise this will expire this month. Yet even if the flow of weapons can be sustained a combination of sluggish production and depleted US inventories still means that it will be difficult to keep Ukraine well supplied in a protracted war.
In these circumstances strategic priorities have to be set with care. The US view is that the most important tasks are pushing back the Russians in eastern Ukraine and undermining them in Crimea. Available capabilities should be used to those ends. In this effort the basics – air defences, artillery pieces, and ammunition - remain essential if the Ukrainians are going to hold back Russian offensives and eventually get their own underway. This is also why US officials worried about Ukraine’s Kursk offensive, about which they were not fore-warned, though they acknowledge that it was well executed.
The Americans have made big commitments to Ukraine and have a big stake in their success which is why they try to influence Kyiv’s strategy. Ukrainians find this second-guessing of their judgements understandably irritating, especially when it holds them back from moves which they think can hurt Russia. These are issues best sorted through dialogue - Zelensky is about to visit Washington. In addition Kyiv can also give itself more options by developing their own indigenous defence industry, something they had in the Soviet era and which, with US and European help, they are now rebuilding. This includes long-range systems. Here Ukraine has made significant progress – with drones already in use and missiles on the way.
It is worth recalling that when Ukraine started using these to attack Russian oil facilities there were also Pentagon worries about whether this made strategic sense, again wanting Ukraine to concentrate on what was relevant to its land battles within Ukraine. These worries did not impress Ukraine and were ignored, as they sought for ways to retaliate after Russian attacks on their energy infratsructure. Now Ukrainian systems are becoming more capable and they are getting more ambitious. On 11 September a multiple drone strike against a supposedly state-of-the-art weapons storage facility at Toropetsi in Tver oblast, about 500 km from Ukraine, led to multiple explosion of Iskander missiles, Tochka-U ballistic missiles, anti-aircraft missiles, and artillery ammunition, with blast levels sufficient to be recorded as a small earthquake. This was followed by similar strikes, including one in the Krasnodar Krai region of Russian, allegedly containing ammunition sent from North Korea. Whatever is decided on the use of Western systems in this role, over time the Ukrainians will increasingly be using their own.
Vertical and Horizontal Escalation
Ukrainians suspect that arguments over strategic priorities are used as a cover for American concerns about escalation. There is some truth in this although it is a less important factor than it was earlier in the war. This is because of a shift in concerns from vertical to horizontal escalation.
Vertical escalation is the sort which prompts the most anxiety because it points to intensifying levels of violence culminating in nuclear use. The Russians have hardly held back in seeking to make life as miserable as possible for Ukraine’s population. This is largely because Moscow is scrambling to find a way to win the war, even though it often justifies its attacks by reference to those conducted by Ukraine against targets in Russia and also occupied Crimea. This escalation has not got close to nuclear use because that would be a momentous step with unpredictable and likely calamitous consequences that would outweigh any possible gains. Putin wants the West to worry about the possibility, but he is not going to go nuclear simply because Ukraine has moved from attacking military targets in Russia with their own systems to attacking them a bit more efficiently with Western systems.
Horizontal escalation is a different matter. I discussed this (without using the term) in a June post. For those who think that Putin’s most recent threat represented some sort of rhetorical escalation it is worth recalling how he reacted last February after President Macron discussed basing Western troops in Ukraine to help with training. This, Putin warned, ‘really threatens a conflict with the use of nuclear weapons, and therefore the destruction of civilization.’ In early May he was already warning of ‘serious consequences’, should Ukraine use western munitions to strike Russia, drawing attention to the ‘small territory’ and ‘dense population’ of European countries. Then in June he was more specific about a possible non-nuclear response to this development.
‘If they consider it possible to deliver such weapons to the combat zone to launch strikes on our territory and create problems for us, why don’t we have the right to supply weapons of the same type to some regions of the world where they can be used to launch strikes on sensitive facilities of the countries that do it to Russia?’
He added, a few days after the original statement:
‘We are not supplying those weapons yet, but we reserve the right to do so to those states or legal entities which are under certain pressure, including military pressure, from the countries that supply weapons to Ukraine and encourage their use on Russian territory.’
Russia has already raised the level of its strategic cooperation with Iran and North Korea so the threat here is more credible, although thus far it is Russia that has benefitted from Iranian drones and ballistic missiles. (Shipments of short-range missiles from Iran to Russia were reported earlier this month). There are risks to Moscow in terms of the effect of closer ties with Iran and its proxies on relations with non-Western states, especially in the Middle East, who do not want to see Iran strengthened or the Houthis in Yemen helped in their efforts to attack shipping in the Red Sea. Nonetheless these are nothing like the risks connected with nuclear use.
Meanwhile Russia has been looking for ways to hurt the West short of actual war. Bill Burns and Richard Moore, respectively the heads of the CIA and SIS, have written about how their agencies have worked together
‘to disrupt the reckless campaign of sabotage across Europe being waged by Russian intelligence, and its cynical use of technology to spread lies and disinformation designed to drive wedges between us.’
Over the past year there have been instances of sabotage at military bases and civilian infrastructure across Europe (including an alleged Russian-backed arson attack on a Ukrainian-linked warehouse in the UK), with a range of targets from US bases in Germany, Polish facilities supporting Ukraine, French rail networks, and civil aviation navigation systems in the Baltic states. Russian ships and aircraft routinely move in and out of Western sea and air space. Disruptive cyberattacks and information operations have been stepped up, including attempts to interfere with the US elections. A number of Western agencies recently released a statement outlining the activities of a Russian GRU Unit 29155 which has ‘conducted computer network operations’ around the world.
‘Unit 29155 cyber actors have defaced victim websites and used public website domains to post exfiltrated victim information. Whether through offensive operations or scanning activity, Unit 29155 cyber actors are known to target critical infrastructure and key resource sectors, including the government services, financial services, transportation systems, energy, and healthcare sectors of NATO members, the EU, Central American, and Asian countries.’
The Financial Times quoted Latvia’s President Edgars Rinkēvičs:
‘Russia is trying to send a message that it is omnipotent and can disturb our societies . . . to instigate fear and to find ways to make our lives more miserable. It is also testing our response, because if we don’t respond these attacks are going to increase.’
Rinkēvičs also described how what are largely inconvenient, irritating measures could turn into something more dangerous, citing the example of a subsea cable being cut in the Baltic Sea. More NATO patrols might reduce the risk but a more drastic step would be to close the sea to Russian vessels, even though that would be tantamount to ‘a declaration of war’.
Now, of course, from Putin’s perspective NATO countries are hardly holding back. Well before Ukraine he saw them backing his domestic opponents and encouraging the spread of liberal ideas which he believes to be subverting Russian civilisation. They have helped thwart his attempted conquest of Ukraine and imposed wide-reaching economic sanctions as a punishment. Russian embassies in Europe have been cut back because so many of their personnel have been expelled, which is why his intelligence agencies have had to recruit criminals to do their work. Putin and his propagandists having been talking about being at war with NATO for some time now, not only because they need an excuse for their failure to subjugate Ukraine, but because they do believe themselves to be engaged in a deep and long-term confrontation.
Escalation is not something to fear in the future but something that has already occurred. Russia escalated when it launched its full-scale invasion and then escalated more in its conduct as it has sought to punish Ukraine for its defiance. It escalated when it deliberately created an energy crisis to coerce the West into abandoning its support for Ukraine and has now moved on to forms of sabotage and subversion, as well as backing countries hostile to the West in their conflicts. The West has responded in its own way, largely with economic sanctions and defensive measures designed to increase resilience. More publicity is being given to Russian activities to increase awareness. All this has moved relations with Russia to a new stage, a form of cold war, with much activity just below the threshold of direct hostilities, but an increasing risk that it might turn hot. We need to be worried as much about what Putin is doing now as about what he might do.
After the US elections there will be a strategic reset of some sort. Naturally most speculation surrounds Trump and his claims that he can repair relations with Putin and end the war, something which he would find to be more difficult than he assumes. Harris’s policies get less attention because she is committed to backing Ukraine against Russian aggression and so she represents continuity. But if she becomes president she will also faces new challenges, with continuing questions about how best to support Ukraine against the backdrop of a wounded Russia lashing out where it can.
16. Volodymyr Zelensky Has a Plan for Ukraine’s Victory
Excerpts:
This war is being fought not just over territory but over values. But during war, in the name of victory, it may not always be possible to maintain these values as one might in peacetime. Do you feel that there are occasions when these two interests—democratic values and the reality of wartime—can clash, or end up in conflict? The United News TV Marathon, for example, which has been on air since the beginning of the invasion, pulls together multiple television channels to broadcast news about the war and other events in a highly coördinated way.
The truth is that journalists came together because, in the early days of the war, when people feared a total occupation of the country, no one knew what to do. Some people took off in one direction, law enforcement in another. There were even stories about how the President had run off somewhere. It was chaos. The fact is that I was among those who stayed and put an end to that chaos, and I don’t think that has led to anything so terrible. Many would say it’s one of the factors that gave people the strength to fight for their country.
But the centralization of power has a downside.
I want to finish. Journalists in Ukraine decided to join forces in order to combat Russian disinformation. I want to make it clear that simply because the news departments of these [six] TV channels have come together it does not mean the channels themselves are destroyed. They exist as they did before. They have kept their own places in the broadcast lineup. They are free to show what they want. But this telemarathon has become a resource for people who, say, have no electricity or see drones flying overhead. There have been lots of periods when there were all kinds of misinformation going around, and the telemarathon provides the truth. And you’re saying this is a bad thing. O.K., if that’s the case, I’m not insisting.
A last question about how war changes a person. It’s hard to imagine an experience with a more profound effect on the human psyche.
I’m still holding it together, if it’s me you’re talking about.
But I wonder if there are moments when you catch yourself reacting to things differently than you might have before. Do you notice you’ve changed at all?
Perhaps I’ve become less emotional. There’s simply no time for that. Just like there’s no time for reasoned discourse and arguments. I only have the opportunity to think aloud in that way during interviews. I don’t do this with my subordinates and colleagues in the government. If I were to sit down and ruminate on every decision for an hour, I would be able to make only two or three decisions a day. But I have to make twenty or thirty.
Volodymyr Zelensky Has a Plan for Ukraine’s Victory
The New Yorker · by Joshua Yaffa · September 22, 2024
The New Yorker Interview
The Ukrainian President on how to end the war with Russia, the empty rhetoric of Vladimir Putin, and what the U.S. election could mean for the fate of his country.
September 22, 2024
Photographs by Jędrzej Nowicki for The New Yorker
Volodymyr Zelensky’s situation room, where the Ukrainian President monitors developments in his country’s war with Russia, is a windowless chamber, largely taken up by a rectangular conference table and ringed by blackened screens, deep inside the Presidential Administration Building, in central Kyiv. On a recent afternoon, as I sat inside, waiting for Zelensky, I heard his voice—a syrupy baritone, speckled with gravel—before he entered, dressed in his signature military-adjacent style: black T-shirt, olive-drab pants, brown boots. He was in the midst of preparations for a trip to the U.S., where he is scheduled to address the United Nations General Assembly and, crucially, meet with Joe Biden at the White House, to present what Zelensky has taken to calling Ukraine’s “victory plan.”
Zelensky is saving the details for his meeting with Biden, but he has said that the plan contains a number of elements related to Ukraine’s long-term security and geopolitical position, which presumably includes joining NATO on an accelerated schedule, and the provision of Western military aid with fewer restrictions. (In the run-up to the trip, Zelensky has been lobbying his allies in the West to allow Ukraine to strike targets deep inside Russia with long-range missiles supplied by the U.S. and other Western countries.) Ukraine’s incursion last month into Kursk, a border region in western Russia—where Ukrainian forces currently occupy around four hundred square miles of Russian territory—is also part of this plan, according to Zelensky, in that it provides Kyiv with leverage against the Kremlin, while also demonstrating that its military is capable of going on the offensive.
Zelensky still presents as the person we have come to know from television screens and social media: an impassioned communicator, confident and unrelenting to the point of stubbornness, an entertainer turned statesman who has weaponized the force of his personality in a thoroughly modern form of warfare. But it is also abundantly clear that the war, now in its third year, cannot be won on Zelensky’s talents alone. A long-awaited Ukrainian counter-offensive fizzled out without much result last year. Russian forces have since steadily increased their foothold in the Donbas, in Ukraine’s east—a grinding campaign in which Russia suffers enormous losses yet manages to march forward, inch by bloody inch. The city of Pokrovsk, a logistics and transport hub in the Donbas, is Russia’s latest target. It is being systematically destroyed by artillery shelling and “glide bombs”—Soviet-era munitions, retrofitted with wings and G.P.S. navigation.
Zelensky has pleaded for more Western military aid, which would certainly help but would not solve Ukraine’s other problems: an inability to sufficiently mobilize and train new soldiers, and ongoing struggles to maintain effective communication and coördination on the front. Meanwhile, across the country, a lack of air defenses has allowed Russia to strike power plants and other energy infrastructure; a recent U.N. report predicted that, come winter, power outages may last up to eighteen hours a day. Polls show increasing levels of fatigue for the war in Ukrainian society, an uptick in those willing to consider peace without a total victory, and an erosion in public trust in Zelensky himself.
Zelensky speaks with the urgency of a leader who knows that he may be facing his last best chance for substantial foreign assistance. Biden is nearing the end of his Presidency, and may be wary of dramatically increasing U.S. involvement, lest he create political headwinds for Kamala Harris in the weeks before November’s election. Donald Trump, meanwhile, has been vague on his policy toward Ukraine. During this month’s debate with Harris, he conspicuously declined to speak of a Ukrainian victory, saying only “I want the war to stop.” In the U.S., Zelensky will discuss his victory plan not only with Biden but also with Harris and Trump. He is clearly aware that the results of the U.S. election hold potentially decisive implications for his country, but he maintains the pose of a man who believes he can still bend history in his favor. “The most important thing now is determination,” Zelensky said in a Presidential address in the days before we met.
During our interview in the situation room, which has been edited for length and clarity, Zelensky skipped between history and political philosophy, military strategy and the mechanisms of international diplomacy. He is a discursive speaker, sometimes hard to pin down, but unfailingly focussed on one overarching message: Ukraine is fighting a war not only with Western backing but on behalf of the West. Ukraine’s sacrifices, Zelensky argues, have kept the U.S. and European nations from having to make more personally painful ones. The argument is clear, even if the response is sometimes disappointing. “If he doesn’t want to support it, I cannot force him,” Zelensky told me, of his upcoming meeting at the White House to discuss his victory plan with Biden. “I can only keep on explaining.”
For some time, when you talked about the end of the war, you talked about a total victory for Ukraine: Ukraine would return to its 1991 borders, affirm its sovereignty in Crimea, and retake all of its territory from Russia. But in recent months, you have become more open to the idea of negotiations—through peace summits, for example, the first of which was conducted this summer, in Switzerland. What has changed in your thinking, and your country’s thinking, about how this war might end?
When I’m asked, “How do you define victory,” my response is entirely sincere. There’s been no change in my mind-set. That’s because victory is about justice. A just victory is one whose outcome satisfies all—those who respect international law, those who live in Ukraine, those who lost their loved ones and relatives. For them the price is high. For them there will never be an excuse for what Putin and his Army have done. You can’t simply sew this wound up like a surgeon because it’s in your heart, in your soul. And that is why the crucial nuance is that, although justice does not close our wounds, it affords the possibility of a world that we all recognize as fair. It is not fair that someone’s son or daughter was taken from them, but, unfortunately, there is a finality to this injustice and it is impossible to bring them back. But justice at least provides some closure.
The fact that Ukraine desires a just victory is not the issue; the issue is that Putin has zero desire to end the war on any reasonable terms at all. If the world is united against him, he feigns an interest in dialogue—“I’m ready to negotiate, let’s do it, let’s sit down together”—but this is just talk. It’s empty rhetoric, a fiction, that keeps the world from standing together with Ukraine and isolating Putin. He pretends to open the door to dialogue, and those countries that seek a geopolitical balance—China, for one, but also some other Asian and African states—say, “Ah, see, he hears us and he’s ready to negotiate.” But it is all just appearance. From our side, we see the game he is playing and we amend our approaches to ending the war. Where he offers empty rhetoric, we offer a real formula for bringing peace, a concrete plan for how we can end the war.
And yet, in 2022 and 2023, your words and actions signalled a categorical refusal to negotiate with the enemy, whereas now you seem to have opened a window to the idea of negotiating, a willingness to ask if negotiations are worth pursuing.
If we go back two years, to the G-20 summit, in Indonesia, in my video appearance, I presented our formula for peace. Since then, I’ve been quite consistent in saying that the Russians have blocked all our initiatives from the very beginning, and that they continue to do so. And I said that any negotiation process would be unsuccessful if it’s with Putin or with his entourage, who are all just his puppets.
Everyone said that we have to allow the possibility of some kind of dialogue. And I told them, “Look, your impression that Putin wants to end the war is misguided. That’s a potentially fatal mistake you are making, I’m telling you.” But, on our end, we have to demonstrate that we do have this desire for dialogue—and ours is a genuine one. Our partners think we should be at the negotiating table? Then let’s be constructive. Let’s have a first summit where we all get together. We shall write up a plan and give it to the Russians. They might say, “We are ready to talk,” and then we’d have a second summit where they say, “This formula of yours, we agree with it.” Or, alternatively, “We disagree. We think that it should be like this and like that.” This is called dialogue. But to make it happen, you have to prepare a plan without the Russians, because, unfortunately, they seem to think that they have a kind of red card, as in soccer, that they can hold up and block everything. Our plan, however—it is being prepared.
I understand that you are going to present this plan to Biden?
The victory plan is a bridge. After the first peace summit, our partners saw that Russia was not prepared for any talks at all—which confirmed my message to them and my insistence that without making Ukraine strong, they will never force Putin to negotiate fairly and on equal terms. No one believed me. They said, We’ll invite them to the second summit and they’ll come running. Well, now we have the second summit planned and they don’t look like they’ll come running.
And so the victory plan is a plan that swiftly strengthens Ukraine. A strong Ukraine will force Putin to the negotiating table. I’m convinced of that. It’s just that, before, I was only saying it and now I’ve put it all on paper, with specific arguments and specific steps to strengthen Ukraine during the months of October, November, and December, and to enable a diplomatic end of the war. The difference this time will be that Putin will have grasped the depth of this plan and of our partners’ commitment to strengthening us, and he will realize an important fact: that if he is not ready to end this war in a way that is fair and just, and instead wishes to continue to try to destroy us, then a strengthened Ukraine will not let him do so. Not only that but continuing to pursue that goal would also considerably weaken Russia, which would threaten Putin’s own position.
What happens if Biden says, “With all due respect, this is a difficult time, the election’s coming up, I’m having enough trouble with Congress without trying to increase aid packages for you,” and he rejects your request—do you have a Plan B?
We have been living in Plan B for years. Plan A was proposed before the full-scale war, when we called for two things: preventive sanctions and preventive reinforcement of Ukraine with various weapons. I told our partners, If Ukraine is very strong, nothing will happen. They didn’t listen. Since then, they have all recognized I was right. Strengthening Ukraine would have significantly lowered the probability of Putin invading.
I’m now proposing a new Plan A. This plan means we change the current course, where it’s only thanks to the strength of our military, the heroic devotion to the European values of our people and our fighters, that we have stood our ground. If you don’t want this war to drag on, if you do not want Putin to bury us under the corpses of his people, taking more Ukrainian lives in the process, we offer you a plan to strengthen Ukraine. It is not a fantasy and not science fiction, and, importantly, it does not require the Russians to coöperate to succeed. Rather, the plan spells out what our partners can do without Russia’s participation. If diplomacy is the desire of both sides, then, before diplomacy can be effective, our plan’s implementation depends only on us and on our partners.
You were right, this plan is designed, first and foremost, with Biden’s support in mind. If he doesn’t want to support it, I cannot force him. If he refuses—well, then we must continue to live inside Plan B. And that’s unfortunate.
What would that look like? I mean, if Biden says no?
That’s a horrible thought. It would mean that Biden doesn’t want to end the war in any way that denies Russia a victory. And we would end up with a very long war—an impossible, exhausting situation that would kill a tremendous number of people. Having said that, I can’t blame Biden for anything. At the end of the day, he took a powerful, historic step when he chose to support us at the start of the war, an action that pushed our other partners to do the same. We recognize Biden’s great achievement in this respect. That step of his already constituted a historic victory.
And what would you say, maybe not even to Biden but to the American public, many of whom feel that we cannot raise our engagement and support for Ukraine any further than we already have?
I would tell them that Ukraine has done everything possible to keep America out of this war, actually. Putin counted on defeating Ukraine in a quick campaign and, had Ukraine not stood its ground, Putin would have marched on. Let’s consider what the consequences would have been. Number one, you would have some forty million immigrants coming to Europe, America, and Canada. Second, you would lose the largest country in Europe—a huge blow to America’s influence on the Continent. Russia would now have total influence there. You would lose everyone—Poland, Germany—and your influence would be zero.
The American public should realize that the fact of Ukraine still standing is not the problem. Yes, war brings difficulties, but Ukraine’s resilience has allowed America to solve many other challenges. Let’s say Russia attacked Poland next—what then? In Ukraine, Russia has found fake legal ground for its actions, saying that it’s protecting Russian-speaking people, but it could have been Poland or it could have been the Baltic states, which are all NATO members. This would have been a disaster, a gut punch for the United States, because then you’re definitely involved full scale—with troops on the ground, funding, investment, and with the American economy going to a wartime footing. So saying that you have been in this war for a long time is just not true. Quite the contrary: I believe that we have shielded America from total war.
Here’s another crucial element: this is a war of postponement for the United States. It’s a way to buy time. As far as Russia is concerned, Ukraine does not even need to lose outright for Russia to win. Russia understands that Ukraine is struggling as it is; it already stands excluded from the European Union and NATO, with nearly a third of its territory occupied. Russia might decide that’s enough, so it might strike Poland just the same—in response to some provocation from Belarus, for example. And so, after two and a half years of your support and investment—for which we are very grateful—you can multiply them all by zero. America would have to start investing from scratch, and in a war of a totally different calibre. American soldiers would fight in it. Which would all benefit Russia tremendously, I should add.
During the Presidential debate, moderators asked Trump whether he wanted Ukraine to win against Russia, and he sidestepped the question. He just said, “I want the war to stop.” It must have troubled you to hear his answer and to consider the prospect of his winning.
Trump makes political statements in his election campaign. He says he wants the war to stop. Well, we do, too. This phrase and desire, they unite the world; everyone shares them. But here’s the scary question: Who will shoulder the costs of stopping the war? Some might say that the Minsk Agreements either stopped or froze the fighting at some point. But they also gave the Russians a chance to arm themselves even better, and to strengthen their fake claim over our territories they occupied.
But isn’t that yet more cause for alarm?
My feeling is that Trump doesn’t really know how to stop the war even if he might think he knows how. With this war, oftentimes, the deeper you look at it the less you understand. I’ve seen many leaders who were convinced they knew how to end it tomorrow, and as they waded deeper into it, they realized it’s not that simple.
Apart from Trump’s own reluctance to talk about Ukrainian victory, he has chosen J. D. Vance as his Vice-Presidential candidate.
He is too radical.
Vance has come out with a more precise plan to—
To give up our territories.
Your words, not mine. But, yes, that’s the gist of it.
His message seems to be that Ukraine must make a sacrifice. This brings us back to the question of the cost and who shoulders it. The idea that the world should end this war at Ukraine’s expense is unacceptable. But I do not consider this concept of his a plan, in any formal sense. This would be an awful idea, if a person were actually going to carry it out, to make Ukraine shoulder the costs of stopping the war by giving up its territories. But there’s certainly no way this could ever happen. This kind of scenario would have no basis in international norms, in U.N. statute, in justice. And it wouldn’t necessarily end the war, either. It’s just sloganeering.
What does it mean for Ukraine that people with such ideas and slogans are rising to power?
For us, these are dangerous signals, coming as they do from a potential Vice-President. I should say that it hasn’t been like this with Trump. He and I talked on the phone, and his message was as positive as it could be, from my point of view. “I understand,” “I will lend support,” and so on.
[Vance and others who share his views] should clearly understand that the moment they start trading on our territory is the moment they start pawning America’s interests elsewhere: the Middle East, for example, as well as Taiwan and the U.S. relations with China. Whichever President or Vice-President raises this prospect—that ending the war hinges on cementing the status quo, with Ukraine simply giving up its land—should be held responsible for potentially starting a global war. Because such a person would be implying that this kind of behavior is acceptable.
I don’t take Vance’s words seriously, because, if this were a plan, then America is headed for global conflict. It will involve Israel, Lebanon, Iran, Taiwan, China, as well as many African countries. That approach would broadcast to the world the following implicit rule: I came, I conquered, now this is mine. It will apply everywhere: land claims and mineral rights and borders between nations. It would imply that whoever asserts control over territory—not the rightful owner but whoever came in a month or a week ago, with a machine gun in hand—is the one who’s in charge. We’ll end up in a world where might is right. And it will be a completely different world, a global showdown.
Let Mr. Vance read up on the history of the Second World War, when a country was forced to give part of its territory to one particular person. What did that man do? Was he appeased or did he deal a devastating blow to the continent of Europe—to many nations, broadly, and to the Jewish nation in particular? Let him do some reading. The Jewish people are a strong power base in the United States, so let them conduct a public-education campaign and explain why millions perished thanks to the fact that someone offered to give up a sliver of territory.
When we last spoke, in 2019, Ukraine was caught in the middle of an American political scandal. There was the question of your phone call with Trump, an implicit threat to curtail U.S. aid, and the subsequent impeachment hearings against a U.S. President. I recently reread our interview, and you told me at the time, “In this political chess match, I will not let Ukraine be a pawn.” Do you worry that Ukraine has now ended up in a similar situation, used by various political actors to push their own agenda or advantage in the U.S. political context?
To be honest, the incident you mention no longer feels as relevant. That was a long time ago. And since then, many things have changed.
Nonetheless, you must have drawn some conclusions from this experience.
I think Ukraine has demonstrated the wisdom of not becoming captured by American domestic politics. We have always tried to avoid influencing the choices of the American people—that would simply be wrong. But, in that incident and elsewhere, I believe we have always demonstrated that Ukraine is definitely not a pawn, and that our interests have to be taken into account.
You have to work to maintain that every day, though. Because the second you relax, that’s exactly what will happen. A lot of world leaders want to have some sort of dealings with Putin, to reach agreements, to conduct some business with him. I look at such leaders and realize that they are very interested in playing this game—and for them, unfortunately, it really is a game. But what makes a real leader? A leader is someone whom Putin needs for something, not a person who needs Putin. Flirting with him is not a sign of strength. Sitting across the table from him might make you believe you’re making important decisions about the world. But what are those decisions really about? Has the war ended? No. Has it produced the outcome you wanted? Not yet. Is Putin still in power? Yes.
Ukraine is a very painful topic for Putin—he wanted to defeat us and couldn’t—which means that it offers a way to build a bond with him. But the truth is that you can only develop relations with Putin on his terms. That means, for instance, proposing that Ukraine should give up some of its territory. This, in a way, is the easiest thing to call for. It is very concrete. And for Putin, it’s a morsel that he doesn’t even have to cut in order to eat—you have already chewed it for him and placed it right in his mouth. When you give it to him, you think you’re so smart and cunning, that after such a gesture Putin will listen to you and support your positions. Well, tell me, when did Putin respect those who come to him from a position of weakness?
After Russia invaded, many people were inclined to compare you to Winston Churchill, Britain’s leader during the Second World War, but you’ve said in interviews that you prefer the example of Charlie Chaplin, who waged a struggle against fascism through appealing to his audience, the public. How do you regard your role as a communicator?
People are always more comfortable relying not on abstract ideas but on some specific historical examples. But it feels immodest to compare myself with the people you mentioned. That said, Chaplin had an unquestionable talent for telling a story, for finding a way to get through to people. He didn’t merely broadcast some facts and numbers—he used the language of cinema to craft an emotional narrative. He used that talent to fight fascism. As for Churchill, he was the leader of a country that found itself in very difficult circumstances, but still managed to be the only country in Europe that firmly said no to fascism. It’s not that other countries necessarily said yes—some were invaded, lost battles, or were subdued in other ways. Hitler occupied much of Europe. But from Churchill and the U.K., there was a firm no. And this no convinced America that it should become a serious ally in the war.
Let’s talk about the Kursk operation. What is its motive? And who is the intended audience: Putin, to show him that Ukraine, too, can go on the offensive, or Ukraine’s Western partners, to demonstrate to them what Ukraine can achieve if given the proper resources?
Both these motives are important, but there is more at stake here. First, it was clear to us that Russia is pressing us in the east. No matter how the Kursk operation ends, military analysts will someday calculate the speed of Russia’s progress and ask, What prevented us from stopping them earlier? How fast were they moving in the east before the Kursk operation began, and why? Ukraine had trouble mobilizing people, they might say, and didn’t have enough strength to stop them, but that is diverting the focus from the more pertinent point—namely, the fact that we should receive what we’ve been promised. I say, first give it to us, and then analyze if the root of the problem is with Ukraine or with you.
Imagine: you’re struggling in a tough war, you’re not receiving aid, you strain to maintain morale. And the Russians have the initiative in the east, they have taken parts of the Kharkiv region, and they’re about to attack Sumy. You have to do something—something other than endlessly asking your partners for help. So what do you do? Do you tell your people, “Dear Ukrainians, in two weeks, eastern Ukraine will cease to exist”? Sure, you can do that, throw up your hands, but you can also try taking a bold step.
Of course, you’re right to wonder if this action will go down in history as a success or a failure. It’s too early to judge. But I am not preoccupied with historic successes. I’m focussed on the here and now. What we can say, however, is that it has already shown some results. It has slowed down the Russians and forced them to move some of their forces to Kursk, on the order of forty thousand troops. Already, our fighters in the east say that they are being battered less frequently.
I’m not saying it’s a resounding success, or will bring about the end of the war, or the end of Putin. What it has done is show our partners what we’re capable of. We have also shown the Global South that Putin, who claims to have everything under control, in fact does not. And we have shown a very important truth to the Russians. Unfortunately, many of them have their eyes closed, they don’t want to see or hear anything. But some Russian people could not help but notice how Putin did not run to defend his own land. No, instead he wants to first and foremost look after himself, and to finish off Ukraine. His people are not a priority for him.
It has been more than a month since the start of the Kursk operation. We continue to provide food and water to the people in territories we control. These people are free to leave: all the necessary corridors are open, and they could go elsewhere in Russia—but they do not. They don’t understand why Russia didn’t come to help, and left them to survive on their own. And people in Moscow and St. Petersburg—far from Kursk—saw that, if one day the Ukrainian Army showed up there, too, it’s far from certain they would be saved. That’s important. That’s also a part of this operation: long before the war gets to these places, or there’s some other crisis, Russian people should know who they have placed in power for a quarter century, with whom they have thrown in their lot.
This war is being fought not just over territory but over values. But during war, in the name of victory, it may not always be possible to maintain these values as one might in peacetime. Do you feel that there are occasions when these two interests—democratic values and the reality of wartime—can clash, or end up in conflict? The United News TV Marathon, for example, which has been on air since the beginning of the invasion, pulls together multiple television channels to broadcast news about the war and other events in a highly coördinated way.
The truth is that journalists came together because, in the early days of the war, when people feared a total occupation of the country, no one knew what to do. Some people took off in one direction, law enforcement in another. There were even stories about how the President had run off somewhere. It was chaos. The fact is that I was among those who stayed and put an end to that chaos, and I don’t think that has led to anything so terrible. Many would say it’s one of the factors that gave people the strength to fight for their country.
But the centralization of power has a downside.
I want to finish. Journalists in Ukraine decided to join forces in order to combat Russian disinformation. I want to make it clear that simply because the news departments of these [six] TV channels have come together it does not mean the channels themselves are destroyed. They exist as they did before. They have kept their own places in the broadcast lineup. They are free to show what they want. But this telemarathon has become a resource for people who, say, have no electricity or see drones flying overhead. There have been lots of periods when there were all kinds of misinformation going around, and the telemarathon provides the truth. And you’re saying this is a bad thing. O.K., if that’s the case, I’m not insisting.
A last question about how war changes a person. It’s hard to imagine an experience with a more profound effect on the human psyche.
I’m still holding it together, if it’s me you’re talking about.
But I wonder if there are moments when you catch yourself reacting to things differently than you might have before. Do you notice you’ve changed at all?
Perhaps I’ve become less emotional. There’s simply no time for that. Just like there’s no time for reasoned discourse and arguments. I only have the opportunity to think aloud in that way during interviews. I don’t do this with my subordinates and colleagues in the government. If I were to sit down and ruminate on every decision for an hour, I would be able to make only two or three decisions a day. But I have to make twenty or thirty.
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Joshua Yaffa is a contributing writer at The New Yorker and the author of “Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin’s Russia,” which won the Orwell Prize in 2021.
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The New Yorker · by Joshua Yaffa · September 22, 2024
17. How Does the U.S.-China ‘Cold War’ End?
Excerpts:
Whether Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris wins the election in November, U.S. policy toward China is guaranteed to remain hawkish.
In fact, Harris’s rhetoric, on the surface, also rings zero-sum. “I will make sure that we lead the world into the future on space and artificial intelligence. That America, not China, wins the competition for the 21st century,” she said in her Democratic National Convention speech—a sentiment that she echoed during her Sept. 10 debate with Trump.
Yet, ultimately, Harris’s China policy is expected to hew closely to Biden’s, which means that “winning” will likely not be defined in existential or ideological terms. Nicholas Burns, the U.S. ambassador to China, summarized the current administration’s position in a September interview for FP Live. “An essential truth about the U.S.-China relationship is that it’s going to be competitive for years to come, well into the next decade. And so we have to pursue that competition,” he said. “But in doing so, if you talk about an end state, we want a peaceful relationship between these two very strong countries with the two strongest militaries of the world.”
Meanwhile, in Trump world, hawks of different feathers will be fighting to stake their claim on the future. If one camp prevails, China policy could continue along its current course of competition—with added Trump characteristics. But there is also a possibility that it could swing toward a reprisal of the Cold War, with the inherent risk that one day that war would turn hot.
How Does the U.S.-China ‘Cold War’ End?
Republicans are divided on whether regime change in Beijing should be the ultimate goal.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/09/19/republican-gop-china-policy-cold-war-regime-change-competition/?tpcc=
September 19, 2024, 2:28 PM
By Lili Pike, a reporter at Foreign Policy.
Foreign Policy · by Lili Pike
Election-harris-trump-2024-functional-tag-2
Stay informed with FP’s news and analysis as the United States prepares to vote.
When it comes to China, popular wisdom in Washington holds that there is a bipartisan consensus: Just about everyone has become a hawk. Both Republicans and Democrats believe that China poses a significant threat to U.S. national security that necessitates urgent action. Politicians from both parties also agree on many policy prescriptions, from blocking Chinese imports with a wall of tariffs to depriving China of semiconductors that could give it a military edge.
When it comes to China, popular wisdom in Washington holds that there is a bipartisan consensus: Just about everyone has become a hawk. Both Republicans and Democrats believe that China poses a significant threat to U.S. national security that necessitates urgent action. Politicians from both parties also agree on many policy prescriptions, from blocking Chinese imports with a wall of tariffs to depriving China of semiconductors that could give it a military edge.
But as the U.S. election rapidly approaches, new fault lines have emerged—not just between the parties, but also within the ranks of the GOP. Republicans are clashing over issues including whether to fully decouple from China economically and whether to add conditions to U.S. support for Taiwan.
One debate hangs above all the rest: what the end goal of U.S.-China competition should be, or whether the United States should even articulate one. On this question of grand strategy, the GOP hawks are in discord.
One set of Republicans is rallying around a controversial idea: that in its competition with China, the United States should explicitly aim for a long-term end state in which Beijing transitions away from its authoritarian form of government.
Proponents of this end goal argue that the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) ideology under President Xi Jinping is antithetical to that of the United States, and that the party’s actions increasingly threaten the United States and its interests. Therefore, they contend, the competition with China will only truly be won once the CCP loses power, or at the very least loses the will and the capacity to threaten the United States.
Members of this camp believe that achieving this end state—not through direct, forcible regime change but perhaps through regime weakening—should be the north star of U.S. policy going forward.
“We need to win the Cold War that Beijing has directed at us,” said Matt Pottinger, China program chairman at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Pottinger served as the deputy national security advisor and chief China policy architect under former U.S. President Donald Trump and has become a central figure in this debate.
“If we want to have a really constructive relationship with Beijing, we shouldn’t kid ourselves that that’s going to happen when you have a totalitarian dictator who has pledged in his inaugural address in 2013 to eliminate capitalism from the earth and to impose a Chinese Communist Party form of socialism, which is really totalitarianism,” Pottinger added.
Other Republicans, while certainly hawkish, warn that setting such an end point for the U.S.-China competition would be dangerously escalatory.
“The problem is that pursuing such a goal is both unlikely to solve the problem, but it also could exacerbate the dangers by increasing the sense of fear and insecurity in Beijing,” said Elbridge Colby, a co-founder of the Marathon Initiative and a former senior Defense Department official under Trump who pushed for a greater focus on China. “We are speaking loudly and carrying a small stick. We should speak softly and carry a big stick.”
Foreign Policy spoke to more than 10 current and former U.S. officials and a range of China experts to understand where American policy might be heading. With the possibility of a second Trump presidency on the horizon, which breed of hawk is ascendant matters far beyond Washington.
Matt Pottinger is seen from the chest upward, wearing a suit and red tie. On either side of him stand two men in similar garb, one of them wearing a lanyard.
Matt Pottinger (center) arrives for the opening ceremony of the Belt and Road Forum at the China National Convention Center in Beijing on May 14, 2017. Mark Schiefelbein/Getty Images
Mike Gallagher wears a suit and tie as he gestures and talks into a microphone. Behind him are activists holding signs, some with Chinese lettering and some in English. One large sign reads "Free China" in English.
U.S. Rep. Mike Gallagher delivers remarks to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the White Paper movement in China. He is seen alongside a group of students and Chinese pro-democracy activists outside the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 29, 2023. Drew Angerer/Getty Images
The opening salvo in this year’s debate came in a spring Foreign Affairs article titled “No Substitute for Victory.” The essay was written by two leading voices on China in the Republican Party in recent years: Pottinger and former U.S. Rep. Mike Gallagher, who led the House select committee on the Chinese Communist Party until leaving office this spring.
Drawing on their preferred analogy, the Cold War, Pottinger and Gallagher critique what they describe as U.S. President Joe Biden’s policy of “détente” for failing to confront the rising threat from China, which seeks “to disintegrate the West and usher in an antidemocratic order.” Instead, they argue that “[t]he United States shouldn’t manage the competition with China; it should win it,” just as it won the Cold War.
They go on to define victory in two parts. First, China—under the sustained pressure of assertive U.S. policy—would abandon its efforts to threaten the United States. And second, after the flaws of the current Chinese approach are exposed, the Chinese people would lead the country out of authoritarianism.
Pointing to Taiwan as an example of what a future democratic China could look like, the authors conclude: “The road to get there might be long. But for the United States’ own security, as well as the rights and aspirations of all those in China, it is the only workable destination.”
The vision is strikingly definitive—though, in an August interview with Foreign Policy, Pottinger added some caveats: “Look, if our goal is to have really good, constructive relations with Beijing, that would require Beijing to become a much more humane government that is not compulsively hostile to the outside world and is not compulsively repressive toward its own people. I’m not saying that that must be the destination.”
As for what role the United States should play in promoting their preferred vision for China’s future, Pottinger and Gallagher have been somewhat ambiguous. They are clear in their Foreign Affairs article that they do not support “forcible regime change, subversion, or war.” Instead, they say that the Chinese people should be the ones to drive change from within. “It’s not for us to decide what the destination is for Beijing’s own form of government,” Pottinger told Foreign Policy.
However, they write that “Washington should seek to weaken the sources of CCP imperialism,” echoing a line from a 1983 Reagan administration directive that called for “internal pressure on the USSR to weaken the sources of Soviet imperialism.” They also call for the United States to help the Chinese people break through the Great Firewall, China’s vast internet censorship system, and communicate freely.
In short, Pottinger and Gallagher preclude the idea of any active U.S. role in overthrowing the Chinese government, but they suggest that Washington has some role to play in putting pressure on the party and empowering the Chinese people. And ultimately, insofar as it is driven by the Chinese people, their long-term aspiration is to see a change of regime in Beijing.
A large red flag with a yellow star inside a circle in the top right corner hangs above a large crowd of students standing in orderly lines, all saluting and wearing matching white and black jackets.
Students attend a celebration of China’s Youth Day at Nanchang Middle School in Shenyang, China, on May 4, 2011. The holiday falls on May 4 every year to commemorate the beginning of the May Fourth Movement in 1919. Getty Images.
As two of the leading Republican voices on China, Gallagher and Pottinger are particularly influential in shaping the debate, but they are not alone in proposing a stark end goal for U.S.-China competition. The idea that the United States should wage an existential ideological battle with China started on the GOP fringe but has gained ground over the years.
The Trump administration’s official China strategy explicitly stated that regime change was not a U.S. goal. But, as Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin wrote in his 2021 book about Trump’s faceoff with China, there was a small group of “superhawks” within the administration—including Steve Bannon, chief strategist to Trump during his first months in office, and Peter Navarro, a top trade advisor—who “wanted to speed the downfall of the CCP.”
Then COVID-19 happened. The pandemic that started in Wuhan, China, in late 2019 prompted a hawkish turn in Trump world. Several key China policy speeches exemplified the shift in tone.
In a May 2020 speech, delivered in Mandarin at the University of Virginia, Pottinger praised students’ calls for democracy during the May Fourth movement in China in 1919 and pondered its legacy today. “Wasn’t the goal to achieve citizen-centric government in China, and not replace one regime-centric model with another one?” he asked. “The world will wait for the Chinese people to furnish the answers.”
Another speech, given a couple months later by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, directly criticized the Chinese government and marshalled history to raise the prospect of democratic reform in China.
Pompeo argued that although Nixon’s engagement policy failed to achieve its goal of liberalizing China, the attempt to “induce change” in China was a noble pursuit; it was just the means that were wrong. Today, Pompeo asserted, the United States should pursue the same goal but use sharper tools. “We, the freedom-loving nations of the world, must induce China to change, just as President Nixon wanted,” he said. “We must induce China to change in more creative and assertive ways, because Beijing’s actions threaten our people and our prosperity.”
Richard Nixon is seen in profile wearing a suit and tie smiles as he shakes hands with A Chinese man wearing a green cap with a red star on it. Other people smile and gather around, and a blue sky is visible overhead.
U.S. President Richard Nixon shakes hands with Chinese citizens in Tiananmen Square during a visit to China on Feb. 1, 1976. Wally McNamee/Corbis via Getty Images
Mike Pompeo is seen in profile in a suit and tie as he stands behind a lecture and microphones. He is flanked by two U.S. flags on stands. A tree and greenery are seen behind him.
Then-U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo delivers a speech about communist China and the future of the free world at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda, California, on July 23, 2020. David McNew/Getty Images
Pompeo was not explicit about the exact nature of that change, but he was clear that it would require U.S. effort. “Changing the CCP’s behavior cannot be the mission of the Chinese people alone,” he said. “Free nations have to work to defend freedom.”
That shift in tone, along with a slew of more aggressive China policies unleashed during the final year of Trump’s presidency, alarmed Chinese experts and officials.
“The year 2020 basically became the worst year [in U.S.-China relations] at least since 1979,” said Da Wei, a professor of international relations at the Beijing-based Tsinghua University. “I think the Trump administration basically advocated for a kind of regime change policy … attacking President Xi himself and the political system. … It’s quite similar to what Pottinger and Gallagher said in the recent article.”
Since Trump left office, calls for a Cold War-style end goal to the U.S.-China competition have begun to come even from mainstream conservative foreign-policy thinkers. The common denominator among these officials and China experts is the belief that the United States can’t fully advance its interests and safeguard its security in the long run while the CCP holds power in China in its current form —but the exact prescription varies.
None of the prominent voices in this debate—including Pottinger and Gallagher—have called for anything as extreme as a scenario in which the United States would take military action to topple the Chinese government. “I don’t know anybody who’s suggested that is feasible in the China context, let alone has suggested that it would be a good idea,” said Zack Cooper, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who has written on the topic.
But many are discussing regime failure as an end goal. Cooper has argued that “Washington should hope for the mellowing or breakup of Chinese power,” echoing George Kennan, the famous U.S. diplomat who designed the containment strategy against the Soviet Union during the Cold War. In Cooper’s view, while Xi rules China, the United States should wait for the CCP to weaken or collapse under the weight of its own shortcomings or pressure from the Chinese people. However, he doesn’t rule out the possibility of some role for the United States to “nudge [China] in a better direction,” in the post-Xi future.
A crowd of protesters wear masks and hold up blank pieces of white paper to demonstrate against censorship during a nighttime protest.
Protesters hold up white sheets of paper to demonstrate against censorship as they march during a protest against China’s strict zero-COVID measures in Beijing on Nov. 27, 2022. Kevin Frayer/Getty Images
Others have advocated for a more active approach. Matthew Kroenig, the vice president of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security and a Foreign Policy columnist, wrote an article this summer with Dan Negrea, the senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Freedom and Prosperity Center, suggesting that one scenario of “winning” the competition with China could involve regime collapse, which would weaken the country and render it less able to harm U.S. interests. The two writers called for the United States to play a role in speeding up this process: “The United States and its allies should work to strengthen themselves as well as counter and weaken China (including by working to loosen the CCP’s grip on power).”
Meanwhile, in Congress, Republicans have also embraced the Cold War metaphor—and some have explicitly called for the CCP’s downfall. Introducing his China strategy in 2021, Sen. Tom Cotton said, “We need to beat this evil empire—and consign the Chinese communists, like the Bolsheviks, to the ash heap of history,” borrowing former President Ronald Reagan’s description of the Soviet Union.
Still, this outlook is hardly the consensus among Republicans.
Colby, the former senior defense official in the Trump administration, has publicly opposed Pottinger and Gallagher’s vision. In his view, as expressed to Foreign Policy, instead of pursuing a definitive end goal, the United States should accept that “competition and rivalry are endemic” and can be “dealt with or managed short of an existential conflict” by maintaining the right balance of power in the region.
Robert O’Brien, who served as Trump’s national security advisor, recently laid out an aggressive China policy proposal for a second Trump term. His plan includes decoupling from China but stops short of calling for fundamental change in Beijing. “We need to be very modest when it comes to regime change with China or Iran or Russia,” he said in an interview with the Wire China this summer. The United States should serve as a beacon of democracy, inspiring the Chinese people, he added, “but that doesn’t necessarily mean active regime change against the Chinese Communist Party.”
Back in Congress, Sen. Jim Risch, the ranking member on the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, also takes a more measured view of the appropriate end goal in the competition. “Obviously in utopia, it would be to get China to no longer be a communist country and be a democratic country with guaranteed freedoms for its people,” he said in an interview with Foreign Policy. But, he added, “I think that’s an unrealistic view.” Instead, he said, “the end goal has got to be where each of the sides gets to the point where they say, ‘We can live with this.’”
Rep. John Moolenaar, the chairman of the select committee on the CCP, has referred to the competition in sweeping Cold War terms: “Our competition, like that with the Soviet Union, is not between two countries, but two visions of the future. The only way our way of life survives is if we win and they lose,” he said at an event on U.S.-China tech competition held on Sept. 18. But when asked about specific policy end goals, he was somewhat ambiguous, saying in a statement to Foreign Policy that the status quo is unacceptable and “[I]t is my hope that the Chinese people will one day have a system of governance that does not rely on oppression and hostility.”
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US China Hawk in Washington
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Former President Trump pumps his fist at 2024 Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Former President Trump pumps his fist at 2024 Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Former Pentagon policymaker Elbridge Colby makes the case for a more transactional, common-sense approach to the world.
This divide within the Republican Party matters now, of course, because the party’s China hawks are vying for influence ahead of a possible second Trump term. The former president’s decision to favor one side or the other could have a significant impact on U.S.-China relations.
In the Republican Party platform and Trump’s campaign platform, China policy has not been expressed in Cold War terms. Both platforms emphasize Trump’s primary focus—economic competition with China—and propose sweeping new tariffs. Nowhere is regime change or even regime collapse listed as a goal—or referred to at all.
In his public remarks, Trump has also shown little appetite for a Cold War-style confrontation. He has favored a more transactional approach to China policy and said repeatedly that he likes Xi. In an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek published in July, he said, “I respect China greatly. I very much respect President Xi. I got to know him very well. And I liked him a lot. He’s a strong guy, but I liked him a lot.” The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
Kroenig, who previously served in government and has advised several previous Republican campaigns on China policy, said in an interview with Foreign Policy that Trump’s campaign platform does not necessarily reflect what his national security strategy would be. “It is more likely the Trump administration will adopt a clear end goal for China,” he said, adding that he can imagine Trump saying, “‘I don’t manage competitions. I win them. We will win the competition with China.’”
Other China experts read the Trump tea leaves differently. Robert Kelly, a professor of international relations at South Korea’s Pusan University, argued that the former president has no interest in an ideological showdown with China. “Trump clearly craves authoritarian powers at home and is happy to take China’s money. It stretches credulity to suggest that Trump will lead the United States, much less an Indo-Pacific coalition, in a major shift against a power that he admires,” he wrote in a recent Foreign Policy piece.
But personnel is—to some extent—policy. Pompeo has said he would serve under Trump again if the opportunity arose. Pottinger, who resigned as deputy national security advisor on Jan. 6, 2021, after Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol, has also said he would be willing to join a second Trump administration. So has O’Brien, who did not articulate a change-in-government end goal, as well as Colby, who opposes the idea.
A man looking at his phone is silhouetted against a building behind him with a giant honeycomb screen displaying the Chinese flag. Around the man are the lights and silhouetted figures of a busy nighttime street.
A man looks at his phone near a giant image of the Chinese national flag on the side of a building in Beijing on Oct. 23, 2017. Greg Baker/AFP via Getty Images
If those advocating for governmental change in Beijing as a destination for U.S. policy do gain the upper hand in a second Trump term, what would their playbook look like?
The details laid out in the various proposals are scant. In some ways, the policies might look quite similar to Biden’s, reflecting the degree of consensus on China. Rush Doshi, a former National Security Council deputy senior director under Biden, pointed out in his critique of Pottinger and Gallagher’s article that their main policy proposals align with the Democrats’ drive to cut dependence on China and recruit allies to balance power in the region.
But a transition from the Biden policy to the one that Pottinger and Gallagher outline would also include significant changes—rhetoric not least among them. They call for accepting greater friction in the relationship and cutting back on diplomacy, which they dismiss as largely toothless—a move that could cut off the remaining areas of U.S.-China cooperation on key global issues such as climate change and fentanyl. They also advocate for dramatically increasing military spending as part of “a generational effort directed by the president to restore U.S. primacy in Asia.”
Some conservative China thinkers have also floated ideas that would more directly challenge Beijing domestically. Pottinger and Gallagher suggested giving Chinese people living under tight surveillance access to uncensored information and communication channels. “Tearing down—or at least blowing holes in—the ‘Great Firewall’ of China must become as central to Washington’s approach today as removing the Berlin Wall was for Reagan’s,” they wrote. This idea was already included in the Trump administration’s Indo-Pacific strategy, which was declassified at the end of his presidency.
In fact, Trump may have dabbled in even more aggressive information warfare against China. Reuters reported in March that halfway through Trump’s presidency, the CIA launched a campaign on Chinese social media “to spread negative narratives about Xi Jinping’s government while leaking disparaging intelligence to overseas news outlets.”
Kroenig described other tactics that the United States might deploy while noting that all would require further consideration. These ideas included disseminating jump drives in China preloaded with the contents of the entire internet—an idea that he said he’d heard could be possible using large language models—to allow people to access information ordinarily censored by the government. Covert operations to sow distrust among the top echelons of the party could also be part of the approach, he said, as well as another classic Cold War strategy: supporting opposition movements in places such as Tibet and Xinjiang.
Donald Trump smiles amid a crowd of children waving U.S. and Chinese flags and holding up flowers. Behind him, mostly obscured, is Xi Jinping.
Then-U.S. President Donald Trump, with Chinese President Xi Jinping behind him, attends a welcome ceremony in Beijing on Nov. 9, 2017. Fred Dufour/AFP via Getty Images
While some of these tactics remain in the realm of ideas, and Trump’s own predilections are far from clear, the end goal debate itself has set off alarm bells in Beijing.
This spring, the Pottinger and Gallagher article circulated widely among Chinese academics, think tank scholars, government officials, and other America watchers, despite the fact that Foreign Affairs is blocked in China.
“This article basically tells the Chinese reader that, yes, it’s true that the U.S.—at least some elements in the U.S. or in the Republican Party—want you-die-and-I-live competition,” said Tsinghua University’s Da. “We think this is, I would say, basically equal to: first, regime change, secondly, defeating China completely. I think this is their goal.”
Liu Yang, a Xinhua reporter who runs a newsletter and podcast on Chinese current affairs, said in an episode responding to the article that it represented the next phase of the downward spiral in U.S. policy. “For me, it is very worrying, because it won’t surprise me if, in one year, we have someone coming out supporting a war and slamming this piece for being too soft on China.”
The debate has also heightened concerns in China about a second Trump term. “Even though China has dealt with President Trump for four years, we still don’t know, if he wins, what kind of Trump administration we will have in 2025,” said Da. “So the basic question I have asked many times in China is, ‘Will Trump 2025 look more like Trump 2018 or Trump 2020?’ That means: Will Trump 2025 be characterized by a transactional approach or regime change policy?”
It’s not hard to imagine how the CCP might respond to a hardening of U.S. policy. “The Chinese clearly pay attention to what prominent people are saying [in the United States],” Colby said. “I don’t think there’s any question that they heard rhetoric on regime change, on primacy, on Taiwan and encouraging moves toward independence—that clearly has affected Chinese decision-making.”
According to Wall Street Journal reporting from 2022, the Trump administration’s hawkish turn, including Pottinger’s 2020 speech, caused the CCP to assess that the United States posed a much greater threat to its survival, which—along with other factors such as the desire for greater deterrence over Taiwan—reinforced the government’s decision to accelerate its nuclear arms buildup.
Pottinger, for his part, dismissed the idea that Beijing was responding to his speech, pointing to pre-2020 U.S. intelligence assessments that China had changed its nuclear strategy. “My staff and I got a good, long, hardy laugh from that report,” he said.
Colby and other China experts fear, though, that more inflammatory rhetoric could lead to further escalation in a relationship that’s already on the edge. “It actually creates the sense that this competition is more existential than it needs to be,” said Doshi, who is now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “There are already plenty of paths to serious confrontation or even conflict between the U.S. and China. We don’t need to add to that list.”
In the Indo-Pacific hot spots, such as the Taiwan Strait, it’s important to give China an “incentive for peace,” Colby said. Jessica Chen Weiss, a professor of China studies at Johns Hopkins University who served in the Biden administration, agreed. “I think the belief that the United States would not stop at anything other than regime change would make it harder to stabilize the situation and prevent the erosion of Taiwan’s autonomy,” she said.
Other risks that these China thinkers have raised include the concern that such rhetoric could backfire, stoking nationalism in China and strengthening the Communist Party’s grip on power. The United States could also alienate allies who have not always aligned with Washington’s approach to China.
Whether Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris wins the election in November, U.S. policy toward China is guaranteed to remain hawkish.
In fact, Harris’s rhetoric, on the surface, also rings zero-sum. “I will make sure that we lead the world into the future on space and artificial intelligence. That America, not China, wins the competition for the 21st century,” she said in her Democratic National Convention speech—a sentiment that she echoed during her Sept. 10 debate with Trump.
Yet, ultimately, Harris’s China policy is expected to hew closely to Biden’s, which means that “winning” will likely not be defined in existential or ideological terms. Nicholas Burns, the U.S. ambassador to China, summarized the current administration’s position in a September interview for FP Live. “An essential truth about the U.S.-China relationship is that it’s going to be competitive for years to come, well into the next decade. And so we have to pursue that competition,” he said. “But in doing so, if you talk about an end state, we want a peaceful relationship between these two very strong countries with the two strongest militaries of the world.”
Meanwhile, in Trump world, hawks of different feathers will be fighting to stake their claim on the future. If one camp prevails, China policy could continue along its current course of competition—with added Trump characteristics. But there is also a possibility that it could swing toward a reprisal of the Cold War, with the inherent risk that one day that war would turn hot.
Robbie Gramer contributed reporting.
Foreign Policy · by Lili Pike
18. Report: Hezbollah pagers were detonated individually; attackers knew who and where the target was
Report: Hezbollah pagers were detonated individually; attackers knew who and where the target was
https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/report-hezbollah-pagers-were-detonated-individually-attackers-knew-who-and-where-the-target-was/
21 September 2024
A video shows a man, left, just before he was
injured by an explosion in a market in Beirut
on September 17, 2024, as pagers used by
Hezbollah exploded across Lebanon.
(Screen capture: X)
Each of the pagers that exploded on their Hezbollah owners across Lebanon on Tuesday, injuring thousands of the terror group’s operatives, was individually detonated, with the attackers knowing who was being targeted, where he was, and whether others were in close proximity, Channel 12 claims.
In a lengthy report quoting Israeli and foreign sources, the TV channel says those behind the attack were determined to ensure that only the person carrying the pager would be hurt by the blast.
“Each pager had its own arrangements. That’s how it was possible to control who was hit and who wasn’t,” it quotes an unnamed foreign security source saying.
The report says: “They knew who he was with and where he was, so that the vegetable seller in the supermarket would not be hurt” when a pager exploded on a man alongside him. This is a reference to footage from the pager explosions in which a man is apparently blown up by his pager next to a fruit and vegetable stand.
The TV report adds several other new details to what has been uncovered so far regarding the unprecedented attack, which Hezbollah has blamed on Israel and Israel has not officially confirmed.
It quotes an unnamed foreign security saying “tens of thousands of pagers” were produced, and manufactured with the knowledge that the client would check them carefully. Therefore, the pagers had to work properly and betray no indication that they had been primed with explosives. Their appearance and weight had to be unchanged.
Interviewed in the report, Ronen Bergman, an investigative reporter for The New York Times and Yedioth Ahronoth, says the whole scheme was dreamed up by a brilliant female intelligence operative, aged less than 30, somewhere in the Middle East.
Whoever was responsible, the report says, decided to set up a factory to build the devices from scratch — so that “it won’t be a device that we will tamper with; it will be a device that we will produce.” The New York Times came to the same conclusion in a report on Thursday.
Israeli spies are behind Hungarian firm BAC Consulting that supplied the devices, NYT reports; other shell compa...
The ability to supply the device to Hezbollah was helped by the fact that the terror group cannot make purchases on the open market, because of suppliers’ fears of US sanctions, and therefore must routinely work with intermediary suppliers.
Channel 12’s report says that when, on October 10, the IDF and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant had pressed for Israel to attack Hezbollah, rather than focus initially on Hamas after its October 7 invasion and massacre, “it is reasonable to assume” that buttons detonating these devices would have been pressed, and very heavy air strikes on Hezbollah would have followed.
In the event, the IDF focused first on Gaza, and Hezbollah has been pounding northern Israel ever since.
The report, which was approved by the Israeli military censor, says Hezbollah bought more pagers after its military chief Fuad Shukr was killed in a targeted IDF strike in Beirut in July, and thereafter used pagers even more widely because of its growing wariness about using mobile phones. Hezbollah, the report says, long assumed that Israel would be a threat to its cellphone communications in the event of a major escalation, and thus widely integrated the use of pagers.
While Channel 12 repeats the widely reported assessment that the pagers were detonated this week because of a fear that the Trojan Horse devices were about to be exposed by Hezbollah, it also quotes a foreign security source saying this was not the case, and that Israel decided it needed to step up its actions against Hezbollah.
Amos Yadlin, a former IDF intelligence chief, says more broadly that Israel’s goal is to cause Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah to realize that his attacks on the north “are costing him more than he’s gaining,” including in terms of support within Lebanon.
The report says it was regarded as “preferable” that the large number of Hezbollah fighters whose devices exploded be badly injured rather than killed, in part because of the immense strain this placed on health services in Lebanon, and by extension the raised domestic pressure on Hezbollah.
A foreign security source tells Channel 12 that the detonating pagers operation is by no means considered a strategic attack, and that Israel has much more dramatic capabilities.
The source says Israel has spent years developing these far more extensive capabilities for use against Hezbollah and Iran, but not as regards to Hamas — apparently because it underestimated the danger posed by Hamas — and that this partly explains the failure to prevent the October 7 catastrophe. The capabilities used thus far in Lebanon are “relatively low-level,” the source says.
Eyal Hulata, a former National Security Adviser, tells Channel 12 after the report airs that thousands of Israelis have been working for years to create capabilities to ensure security for Israel. “There are more capabilities like these,” he says, referencing the recent events in Lebanon. Given the collapse of public faith in the security establishment after the October 7 failure, it is important for Israelis to know this, says Hulata, who is also a former head of the Mossad’s technological branch.
19. Xi Jinping’s ‘gunboat diplomacy’ risks driving his bullied neighbours into enemy hands
Excerpts:
Perhaps Xi is pandering to nationalist sentiment and deflecting attention from domestic failures. Perhaps he calculates that, if push comes to shove, an increasingly self-absorbed America will not fight for the Philippines, Taiwan or other regional partners. He may not be far wrong, especially if unreliable, isolationist-minded Donald Trump returns to office.
Or perhaps, like Russia’s Vladimir Putin in Ukraine, Xi, exercising unchecked dictatorial powers and insulated from impartial advice and opposing arguments, is in the process of making a disastrous, world-shaking miscalculation.
War in general may be a historical certainty. But war right now in the South and East China Seas is wholly avoidable – if only China’s Communists would stop behaving like Victorian imperialists.
Xi Jinping’s ‘gunboat diplomacy’ risks driving his bullied neighbours into enemy hands | China | The Guardian
amp.theguardian.com
Show caption
A Chinese coastguard ship, left, collides with a Philippine coastguard vessel near the Sabina Shoal in the South China Sea on 31 August. Photograph: AP
Opinion
Simon Tisdall
Chinese aggression in the South China Sea forcing countries such as Japan to increase defences and talk up an ‘Asian Nato’
Sat 21 Sep 2024 13.00 EDT
Whoever declared that in this world “nothing is certain except death and taxes” plainly led a sheltered life. Some authorities say Benjamin Franklin coined the phrase, but it was probably first voiced by the memorably named Toby Guzzle, a comedic character in Christopher Bullock’s 1716 English farce, The Cobbler of Preston.
With all due respect to Guzzle, war is a third inescapable, global certainty, as present-day citizens of Lebanon, Ukraine and Sudan know only too well. China’s expansionist regime is testing this proposition again in the choppy waters of the South China Sea. Maritime states from the Philippines to Japan struggle with Beijing’s aggression.
Conflict looks unavoidable. In truth, it has already begun. Western assessments of Asia-Pacific security flashpoints usually focus on China’s threats to seize Taiwan. North Korea’s nuclear arms and missiles are another key concern. South China Sea disputes are often overlooked – but are no less explosive.
Exactly why Xi Jinping, China’s president, appears intent on systematically, gratuitously provoking the neighbours and driving them into the arms of the US, his chief rival, is a puzzle. His actions demonstrate that mindless imperialist “gunboat diplomacy” did not end with Lord Palmerston et al.
Yet Xi’s reasons for attempting to colonise the South China Sea are not difficult to fathom. A vast basin ringed by China, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Brunei, the Philippines and Taiwan, it harbours rich untapped oil, gas and mineral deposits and fisheries. A vital global export route, the sea also has prime strategic importance for China’s defence in its intensifying superpower standoff with the US. Defying international law, infringing other countries’ exclusive economic zones and rejecting rival claims to disputed islands, China says history is on its side in asserting sovereignty over almost the entire area.
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Since Xi took power in 2012, Beijing’s approach has become increasingly confrontational. On the receiving end, more than most, is the pro-western Philippines government of Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr, who succeeded the more China-friendly Rodrigo Duterte as president in 2022. In an unusually violent clash in June at Second Thomas Shoal, in the Spratly Islands (which are inside Manila’s internationally recognised economic zone), Chinese coastguard sailors attacked, looted and damaged Philippine boats, wielding axes and knives. Luckily, no one was killed.
Despite an agreement to defuse tensions, another serious incident followed last month, at Sabina Shoal, also in the Spratlys, when a Philippine ship was rammed and holed. Sabina Shoal is 86 miles west of the Philippines coast – and more than 600 miles from China.
Persistent Chinese provocations have triggered a notable shift in Philippine policy. Marcos is hugging the US close, expanding the scope of a 2014 mutual defence pact while repairing or reinforcing relations with Vietnam, Brunei and other victims of Beijing’s bullying.
“Marcos has returned the country to its strategic moorings by granting the US access to four more military bases,” wrote Marites Dañguilan Vitug in “He has overseen the largest-ever joint military exercises… Washington, for its part, has welcomed Marcos’s upholding of international law, particularly the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.”
Sharp American criticism of China’s actions, and last year’s striking personal pledge to Marcos by Pentagon boss Lloyd Austin that the US “will always have your back in the South China Sea or elsewhere in the region” underline the potentially hazardous worldwide ramifications of these local disputes.
Xi’s expansionist policy is proving similarly counterproductive elsewhere. Japan recently protested against the presence of Chinese ships off the Senkaku islands in the East China Sea, which are claimed by Beijing. In an unprecedented affront last month, a Chinese spy plane violated Japan’s airspace.
In response, like the Philippines, Japan is tightening US military ties, partly because its security and trade would be hugely affected were China to try to forcibly “reunify” Taiwan – as Xi says he wants to do before leaving office. “There’s no war scenario in which Japan wouldn’t be affected by China’s aggression against Taiwan,” wrote Alexander Görlach in Politico. “Not only is it very closely situated to the island nation, there are also around 54,000 US soldiers stationed in Japan, many of them on Okinawa. Washington has repeatedly declared it will support Taiwan militarily should Xi attack.”
Perhaps the latter-day emperor of Beijing believes the neighbours will ultimately kowtow before China’s crude intimidation
As it steadily jettisons post-1945 pacifism, Japan is boosting defence spending and strengthening regional links, for example with its longtime sparring partner South Korea. It has joined the Quad, a security collaboration with India, the US and Australia, and maintains a “maritime dialogue” with Manila. US president Joe Biden was hosting a Quad leaders’ summit this weekend, focusing on the South China Sea.
As such bilateral, multilateral and mutually reinforcing defence links expand and solidify, regional politicians are talking up the idea of an “Asian Nato”. What a huge own goal that would represent for Xi. What is he thinking?
Perhaps the latter-day emperor of Beijing believes the neighbours will ultimately kowtow before China’s crude intimidation and superior economic power. Cambodia and Laos already belong to this category. Malaysia and other members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations are pinning their hopes on diplomacy. An anticipated meeting of 20 foreign ministers on the sidelines of this month’s UN general assembly will discuss the Chinese maritime menace.
Perhaps Xi is pandering to nationalist sentiment and deflecting attention from domestic failures. Perhaps he calculates that, if push comes to shove, an increasingly self-absorbed America will not fight for the Philippines, Taiwan or other regional partners. He may not be far wrong, especially if unreliable, isolationist-minded Donald Trump returns to office.
Or perhaps, like Russia’s Vladimir Putin in Ukraine, Xi, exercising unchecked dictatorial powers and insulated from impartial advice and opposing arguments, is in the process of making a disastrous, world-shaking miscalculation.
War in general may be a historical certainty. But war right now in the South and East China Seas is wholly avoidable – if only China’s Communists would stop behaving like Victorian imperialists.
• Simon Tisdall is the Observer’s Foreign Affairs Commentator
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20. New Zealand’s Army Chief: Pacific Nations Need Tailored Military Training
We should be paying attention to the advice and insights from out allies:
New Zealand, which has trained Pacific soldiers for decades, has little military might and has instead long cultivated its reputation through a type of humble soft power when its armed forces are stationed abroad. It has drawn trust by encouraging frank relationships and “diversity of thought” among its training partners in the South Pacific Ocean, Maj. Gen. Rose King told the AP in an interview at defense headquarters in Wellington on Friday. The army’s highest ranking official, who was appointed in June, is the first woman to lead a branch of the New Zealand military.
“One of the things we’re hearing from some of the Pacific nations is lots of people offering help, but it’s not necessarily the help they want or need,” she said. King’s remarks come during an explosion of what she termed the “great power competition” for Pacific influence, with the vast oceanic region of tiny island and atoll nations becoming one of the world’s most fraught sites of geopolitical contest.
New Zealand’s Army Chief: Pacific Nations Need Tailored Military Training | Military.com
military.com
WELLINGTON, New Zealand — As the U.S., China and other powers vie for strategic influence in Pacific Island militaries, the army chief of New Zealand told The Associated Press that not all of the larger nations bidding to offer support are supplying what tiny island nations find most helpful.
New Zealand, which has trained Pacific soldiers for decades, has little military might and has instead long cultivated its reputation through a type of humble soft power when its armed forces are stationed abroad. It has drawn trust by encouraging frank relationships and “diversity of thought” among its training partners in the South Pacific Ocean, Maj. Gen. Rose King told the AP in an interview at defense headquarters in Wellington on Friday. The army’s highest ranking official, who was appointed in June, is the first woman to lead a branch of the New Zealand military.
“One of the things we’re hearing from some of the Pacific nations is lots of people offering help, but it’s not necessarily the help they want or need,” she said. King’s remarks come during an explosion of what she termed the “great power competition” for Pacific influence, with the vast oceanic region of tiny island and atoll nations becoming one of the world’s most fraught sites of geopolitical contest.
China's influence in the region alarms the West
King did not single out countries by name. Military chiefs in New Zealand are in non-political roles and are not permitted to comment publicly on government policy. That includes decisions about foreign affairs or military deployments. But New Zealand’s 2023 defense policy statement cites China’s assertive push through the Pacific over the past decade shoring up security deals and agreements to train or equip military or police in a growing list of friendly nations. That has alarmed Western powers so much that it has provoked the U.S. and Australia to pitch their own training measures.
Small military but strong on forging relationships
New Zealand’s army totals a few thousand members for a remote island nation of 5 million people, with little military might or front-line combat involvement in modern times. Military spending is tiny, even for a small nation. But defense analysts say larger powers could learn from New Zealand how to forge better relationships in the Pacific.
“The U.S. and Australia don’t always get those personal relationships quite right, they don’t know how to sit and listen properly,” said Blake Johnson, from the think tank Australian Strategic Policy Institute. The U.S. at times struggled to scale down its proposals to fit Pacific needs, he said.
“And the way that China polices is different to the way that Australia and New Zealand polices,” Johnson said. “They’re typically a bit heavier-handed in their response.”
New Zealand, however, had strong Indigenous cultural links with the Pacific, understood small-scale operations and had the flexibility to adapt. “If anything it’d be great if New Zealand could shout a bit louder to the other partners,” he said.
But New Zealand’s small military footprint presents challenges too. King inherited an army described within the defense force as fragile and hollow. Attrition rates for the service have fallen since a 2022 peak of just over 17% but remain at more than 9% — high among comparable countries.
Vehicles and buildings have grown run down and some barracks where soldiers live with their families are out of use due to black mold. New Zealand does not have a strong military service culture among the public and as a result, politicians need not impress voters with big defense budgets.
Military spending fell to 0.9% of gross domestic product this year from 1% last year and as austerity sweeps across New Zealand’s public sector, the army, too is faced with cuts to make up the shortfall.
“Part of me is really proud that most New Zealanders don’t necessarily see the same threats that I see face our country,” King said. “But yes, there are challenges with that as well.”
When she and her husband, who is also in the army, spent time in America, they were surprised to be thanked for their service by strangers. “That generally doesn’t happen in New Zealand,” King said. “I do think there’s an opportunity for us to share our story more.”
More women in the New Zealand army's ranks
King downplays her status as the first woman to lead a military service in New Zealand. Joining the army in 1991, she arrived at a time when she could not serve in all parts of the army because she was a woman.
Now, 15% of serving army personnel are women. “I would hope to see that figure increase, definitely,” King said, although she was reluctant to cite her planned measures to lift it.
Military forces globally face other cultural challenges to which New Zealand is not immune. The difficulty of detecting those with extremist views who enter the service, for example, particularly white supremacists, has vexed countries including the U.S.
“I’m confident that we’re doing our best in regard to, how do we ensure we’re getting the right people to join us?” King said.
Changes around the world affect New Zealand's army also
Despite the country’s remote location and small military footprint, New Zealand’s army faces more pressure on its resources and staff than before and uncertainty about how to prepare for the future. State-on-state conflict — once almost eliminated — is surging in the Russia-Ukraine war and in the Middle East, while climate change pummels New Zealand and the Pacific, with the army facing growing demand for humanitarian aid.
“You’re going to have an increase not only in the frequency of climate change, but also the scale of what’s occurring is at bigger levels, and anything that happens in the Pacific impacts us," said King.
Matters such as transnational crime showed the current threat environment was not simply “war or not war,” she said.
“I think it comes down to what New Zealand is,” said King, noting that her country is a small, trade-based nation at the bottom of the world.
“If we don’t have the international rules-based order that we currently have, if that is challenged, then we are challenged as a nation,” she said.
military.com
21. World leaders are gathering in New York for the U.N. General Assembly. The outlook is gloomy
A huge BFO* here:
A key reason for the Security Council’s dysfunction is the deep division among its five veto-wielding permanent members. The United States, Israel’s closest ally, is a supporter of Ukraine alongside Britain and France. Russia invaded Ukraine and has a military and economic partnership with China, though Beijing reasserted its longstanding support for every country’s sovereignty without criticizing Russia in a recent briefing paper for the U.N. meetings.
(*Blinding Flash of the Obvious)
World leaders are gathering in New York for the U.N. General Assembly. The outlook is gloomy
By EDITH M. LEDERER
Updated 12:11 AM EDT, September 22, 2024
AP · September 22, 2024
UNITED NATIONS (AP) — Facing a swirl of conflicts and crises across a fragmented world, leaders attending this week’s annual U.N. gathering are being challenged: Work together — not only on front-burner issues but on modernizing the international institutions born after World War II so they can tackle the threats and problems of the future.
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres issued the challenge a year ago after sounding a global alarm about the survival of humanity and the planet: Come to a “Summit of the Future” and make a new commitment to multilateralism – the foundation of the United Nations and many other global bodies – and start fixing the aging global architecture to meet the rapidly changing world.
The U.N. chief told reporters last week that the summit “was born out of a cold, hard fact: international challenges are moving faster than our ability to solve them.” He pointed to “out-of-control geopolitical divisions” and “runaway” conflicts, climate change, inequalities, debt and new technologies like artificial intelligence which have no guardrails.
The two-day summit started Sunday, two days before the high-level meeting of world leaders begins at the sprawling U.N. compound in New York City.
The General Assembly approved the summit’s main outcome document — a 42-page “Pact of the Future” — on Sunday morning with a bang of the gavel by Assembly President Philémon Yang signifying consensus, after the body voted 143-7 with 15 abstentions against considering Russian-proposed amendments to significantly water it down.
The pact is a blueprint to address global challenges from conflicts and climate change to artificial intelligence and reforming the U.N. and global institutions. Its impact will depend on its implementation by the assembly’s 193 member nations.
“Leaders must ask themselves whether this will be yet another meeting where they simply talk about greater cooperation and consensus, or whether they will show the imagination and conviction to actually forge it,” said Agnès Callamard, the secretary-general of Amnesty International. “If they miss this opportunity, I shudder to think of the consequences. Our collective future is at stake.”
This is the UN’s biggest week of the year
The summit is the prelude to this year’s high-level meeting, held every September. More than 130 presidents, prime ministers and monarchs are slated to speak along with dozens of ministers, and the issues from the summit are expected to dominate their speeches and private meetings, especially the wars in Gaza, Ukraine and Sudan and the growing possibility of a wider Mideast war.
“There is going to be a rather obvious gap between the Summit of the Future, with its focus on expanding international cooperation, and the reality that the U.N. is failing in Gaza, Ukraine and Sudan,” said Richard Gowan, U.N. director for the International Crisis Group. “Those three wars will be top topics of attention for most of the week.”
One notable moment at Tuesday’s opening assembly meeting: U.S. President Joe Biden’s likely final major appearance on the world stage, a platform he has tread upon and reveled in for decades.
At the upcoming meetings, U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield told reporters this week: “The most vulnerable around the world are counting on us to make progress, to make change, to bring about a sense of hope for them.”
To meet the many global challenges, she said, the U.S. focus at the U.N. meetings will be on ending “the scourge of war.” Roughly 2 billion people live in conflict-affected areas, she said.
Last September, the war in Ukraine and its president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, took center stage at the U.N. global gathering. But as the first anniversary of Hamas’ deadly attack in southern Israel approaches on Oct. 7, the spotlight is certain to be on the war in Gaza and escalating violence across the Israeli-Lebanon border, which is now threatening to spread to the wider Middle East.
Iran supports both Hamas in Gaza and Lebanon’s Hezbollah militants. Its new president, Masoud Pezeshkian, will address world leaders on Tuesday afternoon. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is scheduled to speak Thursday morning and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday afternoon.
Zelenskyy will get the spotlight twice. He will speak Tuesday at a high-level meeting of the U.N. Security Council — called by the United States, France, Japan, Malta, South Korea and Britain — and will address the General Assembly on Wednesday morning.
They’re trying to counter ‘a world of grim statistics’
Slovenia, which holds the council’s rotating presidency this month, chose the topic “Leadership for Peace” for its high-level meeting Wednesday, challenging its 15 member nations to address why the U.N. body charged with maintaining international peace and security is failing — and how it can do better.
“The event follows our observation that we live in a world of grim statistics, with the highest number of ongoing conflicts, with record high casualties among civilians, among humanitarians, among medical workers, among journalist,” Slovenian U.N. Ambassador Samuel Zbogar told reporters. He cited a record-high 100 million people driven from their homes by conflict.
“The world is becoming less stable, less peaceful, and with erosion of the respect for the rules, it is sliding into the state of disorder,” Zbogar said. “We have not seen this high need to rebuild trust to secure the future ever before.”
A key reason for the Security Council’s dysfunction is the deep division among its five veto-wielding permanent members. The United States, Israel’s closest ally, is a supporter of Ukraine alongside Britain and France. Russia invaded Ukraine and has a military and economic partnership with China, though Beijing reasserted its longstanding support for every country’s sovereignty without criticizing Russia in a recent briefing paper for the U.N. meetings.
French President Emmanuel Macron and Britain’s new prime minister, Keir Starmer, will be at the United Nations this week along with Biden. But Russian President Vladimir Putin and China’s President Xi Jinping are sending their foreign ministers instead. Neither Putin nor Xi attended last year, either.
Guterres, who will preside over the whole affair this week, warned that the world is seeing “a multiplication of conflicts and the sense of impunity” — a landscape where, he said, “any country or any military entity, militias, whatever, feel that they can do whatever they want because nothing will happen to them.”
“And the fact that nobody takes even seriously the capacity of the powers to solve problems on the ground,” he said, “makes the level of impunity (on) an enormous level.”
___
Edith M. Lederer, chief U.N. correspondent for The Associated Press, has covered foreign affairs for more than 50 years.
AP · September 22, 2024
22. Why Meta is now banning Russian propaganda
Excerpts:
Such methods are why Mimikama spokesperson Wolf believes that RT still represents the most harmless part of Russian propaganda — because here at least the Russian influence is known.
"But when I read a page on Facebook called Health Now, for example, and pro-Russian content is constantly appearing between great health tips, I don't immediately recognize the propaganda background," he said. "I find that much more perfidious."
Blocking won't remedy this, Wolf added. "The only thing that helps is pre-bunking, as in educating people about how propaganda and disinformation works."
Why Meta is now banning Russian propaganda
David Ehl
8 hours ago8 hours ago
https://www.dw.com/en/why-meta-is-now-banning-russian-propaganda/a-70290904
Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp all no longer allow content from Russian state media such as RT. The timing is hardly coincidental.
Social media giant Meta aims to shield users from Russian state media propaganda
Image: Arnd Wiegmann/REUTERS
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For European users, everything still looks the same when scrolling their timelines on Instagram, Facebook or Threads. In other parts of the world, this week marked a change: between memes, animal videos and vacation photos, media posts still appear, but no longer include links to content from Russian state broadcaster RT, the Rossiya Segodnya news agency or related brands.
That's because Meta, which owns the aforementioned platforms as well as the WhatsApp messenger, has pulled the plug on these propaganda organs worldwide. The group had already throttled the reach of the platforms shortly after the start of Russia's war of aggression on Ukraine in spring 2022, blocking access from the EU and the UK, for example, following a corresponding request.
"After careful consideration, we expanded our ongoing enforcement against Russian state media outlets. Rossiya Segodnya, RT and other related entities are now banned from our apps globally for foreign interference activity," Meta announced on September 16.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has had many years of experience in balancing the goals of his company with political demands
Image: Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP/picture alliance
Publicly accessible Facebook Community Standards explicitly prohibit "foreign interference." But Meta did not answer specific questions from DW about the timing of last week's announcement, or whether the move is related to sanctions or the upcoming US presidential election.
Preventing election interference
Andre Wolf from the Austrian internet awareness association Mimikama has a clear opinion as to why the US group has now taken action. "We are a few weeks from the US election — that is the crucial point. And that's why the step has now been taken, so that Russia can't interfere," Wolf told DW.
Washington had already tightened its sanctions against the Russian propaganda network around the RT channel on September 13. The move was justified with indications that RT, together with the Russian secret services, wanted to manipulate EU candidate country Moldova's presidential election in October to suit the Kremlin's interests. But the White House had also previously warned of Russian influence on the US presidential election in November.
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Meta likes to be seen as 'the good guys among the bad guys'
Big tech companies don't exactly have the best reputation to begin with, but from Wolf's point of view, Meta presents itself as "the good guys among the bad guys." Examples of the latter might include Telegram founder Pavel Durov, who was arrested in Paris in late August, accused of failing to cooperate in the fight against illegal content. Or Elon Musk, whose platform X was blocked by a Brazil court after he failed to take steps against right-wing fake news accounts.
Former Facebook engineer Frances Haugen publicly revealed how much her employer knew about the dangers of Instagram to young users
Image: Pedro Nunes/REUTERS
Meta, whose oldest brand Facebook has been online for 20 years, has had the longest learning process of them all, said Mimikama spokesperson Wolf. "Because they were the first and biggest, they were always watched closely."
"They were always there when it came to developing something, be it guidelines against hate speech or fake news. Meta was the first to start flagging false reports."
But it's still important to remember that as a private company, Meta still has an interest in emotionalizing and polarizing content that users interact with for as long as possible, he added.
Felix Kartte, an expert on platform regulation at the Mercator Foundation in Essen, Germany, who has worked for the EU, NATO and the global nonprofit organization Reset.Tech, does not believe that Meta needs to present itself as a serious provider. This train has long since left the station, for example when former Facebook engineer Frances Haugen leaked secret internal documents in 2021 grappling with the negative mental health effects of Instagram on teenagers.
"I really believe that a serious external perception is not the main focus for Meta right now," Kartte said. "I think it's more about mitigating possible pushback by legislators or authorities and generating a bit of goodwill."
Andre Wolf sees signs that Russia has been waging a digital war since 2014 to stir up confusion in the West. Here, an anti-NATO protest in Berlin in 2023
Image: Michael Kuenne/Presscov/Zuma/picture alliance
Just the tip of the iceberg
It's also difficult for Meta to effectively ban Kremlin propaganda from its channels, Kartte added, saying that Russia's propaganda apparatus is prepared for such takedowns.
"It has been apparent for years that Russia is relying less and less on these central propaganda media like RT alone, but has instead developed a decentralized propaganda strategy," he said.
"For example, it finances influencers, that is supposedly normal citizens who run a YouTube channel or a Telegram account, to spread Russian propaganda lines among the population under the guise of citizen journalism." Another method would be doppelganger sites — deceptively real replicas of reputable media platforms that are used to spread propaganda.
Such methods are why Mimikama spokesperson Wolf believes that RT still represents the most harmless part of Russian propaganda — because here at least the Russian influence is known.
"But when I read a page on Facebook called Health Now, for example, and pro-Russian content is constantly appearing between great health tips, I don't immediately recognize the propaganda background," he said. "I find that much more perfidious."
Blocking won't remedy this, Wolf added. "The only thing that helps is pre-bunking, as in educating people about how propaganda and disinformation works."
This article was originally written in German.
23. Chief of Naval Operations Discusses Navigation Plan 2024
Excerpt:
"China is clearly the pacing challenge," she said. "They are on [...] a wartime footing."
Chief of Naval Operations Discusses Navigation Plan 2024
Sept. 20, 2024 | By Joseph Clark, DOD News |
defense.gov · by Joseph Clark
The Navy's top admiral yesterday underscored the imperative for the nation's sea service to continue to meet the demands of an evolving technology and national security landscape.
Navigation Plan for America's Warfighting Navy 2024
Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti discusses her recently released Navigation Plan for America's Warfighting Navy 2024 at Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, Sept. 19, 2024.
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Credit: Navy Senior Chief Petty Officer Elliott Fabrizio
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Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa M. Franchetti discussed her recently released Navigation Plan for America's Warfighting Navy 2024 during a discussion hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a public policy think tank in Washington.
Franchetti's plan outlines her guidance to the fleet to meet future challenges and expand the Navy's contribution to the joint warfighting ecosystem.
She noted the key role the Navy will play in maintaining the United States' military advantage amid a changing geopolitical environment and increasing competition with China.
"China is clearly the pacing challenge," she said. "They are on [...] a wartime footing."
The CNO added that China presents a multidomain challenge encompassing not only military, but also economic competition. She noted China's lack of transparency about its actions around the globe, and their affinity for use of dual-use technologies to accomplish its aims.
Talking to the Crew
Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti wishes the crew a 'Happy Thanksgiving' over the ship’s internal communications system during a visit to the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer USS John Finn, Nov. 23, 2023.
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Franchetti also noted the changing nature of war and the imperative to adopt robotic and autonomous technology and the reach and lethality of the fleet as key guide rails for the strategy going forward.
Domestic fiscal and industrial base constraints add to the Navy's challenge, she said, as the service recognizes the need to grow its fleet.
Franchetti released the plan earlier this week. It identifies two overarching strategic ends: readiness for the possibility of war with China by 2027 and enhancement of the Navy's long-term advantage.
The plan also includes seven, core fleet readiness targets under Project 33, a reference to Franchetti serving as the 33rd CNO. Those targets include:
- Ready the force by eliminating ship, submarine and aircraft maintenance delays
- Scale robotic and autonomous systems to integrate more platforms at speed
- Create the command centers our fleets need to win on a distributed battlefield
- Recruit and retain the force we need to get more players on the field
- Deliver a quality of service commensurate with the sacrifices of our sailors
- Train for combat as we plan to fight, in the real world and virtually
- Restore the critical infrastructure that sustains and projects the fight from shore
Franchetti said the navigation plan captures how the Navy can think, act and operate differently with the resources it has to make the most gains in the shortest time possible.
Navigation Plan for America's Warfighting Navy 2024
Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti discusses her recently released Navigation Plan for America's Warfighting Navy 2024 at Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, Sept. 19, 2024.
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"If you look at the ways we're trying to do that through implementing Project 33, which are really seven areas that as I worked with my team, with our four-star fleet commanders, these are areas that I can put my thumb on the scale," she said. "We could make a difference in those areas, and it will make a meaningful contribution to our ability to be more ready by 2027.
The plan also lays out the Navy's plan to expand its contribution to the joint warfighting ecosystem, building upon the implementation framework for fielding key capabilities outlined in the 2022 Navigation Plan, with an additional focus on scaling robotic autonomous systems.
The implementation framework focuses on five capabilities ranging from long-range fires to contested logistics. It also focuses on four key enablers ranging from artificial intelligence to robotic and autonomous systems.
For further information visit the CNO Navigation Plan 2024 website.
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defense.gov · by Joseph Clark
24. The weaponization of everything has begun
A deterrence discussion. How do you deter non-state actors?
Excerpts:
The various strategies of deterrence – nuclear arsenals, for example, which involve mutually assured destruction – do, at least for now, keep much of our conflict below the threshold of open war.
And if geopolitical tensions do reach a point where Vladimir Putin’s Russia explores these new military possibilities, then we would probably have far more to worry about than exploding iPhones.
But it is non-state actors that may not be deterred from using this type of attack. So we need to hope they lack the serious organizational skill required to transform everyday items into explosive devices – and we need to hope that security services throughout the world are keeping their eye on emerging threats.
In times of dramatic and rapid change in AI, drones, robots and cyberattacks, the only certainty is uncertainty in this complex, and often terrifying, world we are living in.
The weaponization of everything has begun - Asia Times
Israel’s turning of everyday communication and information tools into deadly weapons births new era of paranoia and fear
asiatimes.com · by Mark Lacy · September 20, 2024
The attacks on pagers and walkie-talkies (and possibly even solar panels) in Lebanon is one of those events that many have speculated was on the horizon: the weaponization of everyday objects in 21st-century conflicts.
But there were probably those who thought this “weaponization of everything”– as security analyst Mark Galeotti puts it – was the stuff of Hollywood movies or cyberpunk crime thrillers.
Transforming pagers or phones into explosive devices, in their view, was probably not possible both in technological or logistical terms. It was the type of scenario that only the most paranoid would think could actually become a reality.
Yet it has now happened. And it has claimed the lives of 37 people, injured thousands more, and has created the possibility of catastrophic organizational disruption.
The ability to communicate across your army or terrorist network has always been fundamental to warfare. And the ability to communicate – and to communicate quickly – is even more important as the geographical scale of war expands.
An organization needs to be able to trust that its tools of communication are reliable. And it needs to trust that the people they are talking to are real and not fake (or the products of AI – an increasing fear in times of “deep fakes”).
Members of an organization also need to find ways to ensure that they are not being listened to – a constant fear in times when the tools of communication are constantly evolving in their power and complexity.
So, any organization in the 21st century has to be paranoid about the threats of digital disruption and the different ways information and communication can be stolen, monitored and corrupted, or manipulated.
But turning the everyday tools of communication and information into actual weapons creates a new type of paranoia and fear.
How concerned should we be?
There are many people who will argue that what we are seeing in Lebanon will inevitably be coming to a neighborhood near you.
Audrey Kurth Cronin, director of the Institute for Strategy & Technology at Carnegie Mellon University in the US, has argued that one of the biggest security challenges on the horizon is the possibility of lethal enhancement by non-state actors in a time of “open technological innovation.”
In other words, we are living in times when the use of disruptive technologies is open to a growing number of organizations and individuals. It is no longer the great powers that have all the technological might.
The Lebanese army carried out controlled explosions of mobile communications devices after the attacks on September 17 and 18. Photo: EPA-EFE via The Conversation / Wael Hamzeh
At the same time, in an era of increasing geopolitical tensions, there might be world leaders who feel that they can test the possibilities of the tactics that their hackers and technological experts have been planning and experimenting with.
In 1999, two colonels in the Chinese military wrote a book on the changing character of war and international politics in an age of digital technologies. I discussed their ideas in my 2023 book Theorising Future Conflict: War Out to 2049.
One of the most troubling comments in their book is on the potential weaponization of everything in future global conflicts: “[These] new concept weapons will cause ordinary people and military men alike to be greatly astonished at the fact that commonplace things can also become weapons with which to engage in war.”
So, the events in Lebanon might give us a sense of what these military futurists from China saw on the horizon. Of course, it remains to be seen whether states will be able to keep up with a constantly changing security landscape. We are in a time of rapid change in a variety of emerging technologies.
States that have more pressing concerns and lack the resources might have more to worry about. And groups such as Hezbollah may be entering a new period of vulnerability as this new age of conflict moves from futurist speculation to brutal reality.
Geopolitical impact
The events in Lebanon are not over and we don’t know whether more attacks are to come. We also don’t know what the broader geopolitical impact the attacks will have on the region.
But, for the time being, it looks like there is a digital and geopolitical divide between those who will suffer these new tactics in this weaponization of everything and those that will be able to orchestrate increasingly creative types of attacks at a distance on individuals and organizations.
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For countries like the UK, it seems unlikely that global conflict would reach a point where hostile states such as Russia would exploit any vulnerabilities they have uncovered in the devices people use in everyday life.
The various strategies of deterrence – nuclear arsenals, for example, which involve mutually assured destruction – do, at least for now, keep much of our conflict below the threshold of open war.
And if geopolitical tensions do reach a point where Vladimir Putin’s Russia explores these new military possibilities, then we would probably have far more to worry about than exploding iPhones.
But it is non-state actors that may not be deterred from using this type of attack. So we need to hope they lack the serious organizational skill required to transform everyday items into explosive devices – and we need to hope that security services throughout the world are keeping their eye on emerging threats.
In times of dramatic and rapid change in AI, drones, robots and cyberattacks, the only certainty is uncertainty in this complex, and often terrifying, world we are living in.
Mark Lacy is senior lecturer of politics, philosophy and religion, Lancaster University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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De Oppresso Liber,
David Maxwell
Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy
Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation
Editor, Small Wars Journal
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
Phone: 202-573-8647
email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com
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