Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

"People, when they first come to America, whether as travelers or settlers, become aware of a new and agreeable feeling: that the whole country is their oyster."

– Alistair Cooke

"Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, it's inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery."

– Winston Churchill

"Intolerance of ambiguity is the mark of an authoritarian personality."

– Theodor Adorno

1. China’s Messaging to the U.S.: Don’t Rock the Boat

2. Is a Leading Ukraine Skeptic Influencing White House Policy?

3. South Africa tells the UN top court Israel is committing genocide in Gaza as a landmark case begins

4. South Africa Takes Israel to Court

5. Xi’s Chief of Staff Is Quietly Amassing Even More Power in China

6. Taiwan bombarded with cyberattacks ahead of election

7. Israel Has No Plans to Force Palestinians Out of Gaza or Permanently Occupy It, Netanyahu Says

8. China’s Communist party watchdog warns business of graft crackdown

9. American intel officials warn of risk of Hezbollah attacking U.S.

10. Why China Would Struggle to Invade Taiwan

11. Senator's hold is a dangerous attempt to stifle discussion

12. Millionaire conwoman, 57, is accused of bilking US Army out of over $100 MILLION

13. Lawmakers launch investigation into Austin’s health secrecy

14. Hamas Tunnel Found Near School, Rocket Launcher Near Kindergarten

15. Hamas’s Top Terrorist Leadership

16. This 2024 presidential election could change the world – and it’s not happening in the US

17. China tells U.S. it will ‘never compromise’ on Taiwan as the island’s election draws near

18. Opinion | The U.S. nudges Israel toward an off-ramp from war

19. US Is Weaponizing New Economic Tools to Slow China’s War Machine

20. Army Sees Sharp Decline in White Recruits

21. Top Marine could return to work in a matter of weeks, Del Toro says

22. Meet the skateboarding Green Beret shredding the civilian-military gap

23. No, Taylor Swift is not a Pentagon PsyOp

24. How Lloyd Austin’s Deputy Ended Up Running the Pentagon From the Beach

25. Fifty-Five Hours of Risk: The Dangerous Implications of Slow Attack Attribution

26. Victory Is Ukraine’s Only True Path to Peace

27. Iran's 'Axis of Resistance' Becomes an 'Axis of Escalation' | Opinion

28. Don’t Bomb the Houthis

29. Opinion | Lloyd Austin doesn’t deserve to be the piñata of the day in Washington

30. Analysis | Senators warn AI could lead to ‘destruction’ of local news

1. China’s Messaging to the U.S.: Don’t Rock the Boat

I doubt we will see many political figures or the media using the new catchphrase, the "San Francisco vision." Perhaps those who do use it will be exposing their preferences.

But it sure sounds good. Excellent political warfare by the Chinese:

“The San Francisco vision refers to promoting dialogue and cooperation while managing the difficulties, including over the Taiwan issue,” he said.

China’s Messaging to the U.S.: Don’t Rock the Boat

With a new catchphrase, Beijing’s outreach goes into high gear ahead of Taiwan elections

https://www.wsj.com/world/chinas-messaging-to-the-u-s-dont-rock-the-boat-c959cb1c?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=1

By James T. Areddy

Updated Jan. 10, 2024 8:24 pm ET

Chinese leader Xi Jinping addressed Communist Party members this week in Beijing. PHOTO: PANG XINGLEI/ZUMA PRESS

A new buzzword is emerging in Beijing’s messaging to Washington: the “San Francisco vision”—a veiled warning to the U.S. not to rock the boat after a reset in ties at a November summit in California between President Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

Diplomatic outreach has gone into high gear in recent days, including with a New York appearance Tuesday by an English-speaking senior envoy of the Chinese Communist Party. The push comes ahead of Saturday’s election in Taiwan that will usher in a new president for the first time in eight years and amid a raft of other geopolitical hot-button issues where the nations don’t see eye-to-eye.

Last year, the catchphrase was “return to Bali,” the place of another Biden-Xi summit, in similar rhetoric aimed at pressuring the Biden administration not to squander hard-to-come-by goodwill between the two nations.

How interested Beijing remains in sustaining communication channels with the U.S. might become more apparent in its responses to the Taiwan election results.

For China, Liu Jianchao, minister in charge of the International Department of the party’s Central Committee, warned in New York, Taiwan is at the “very core of the core interests.”

“Any international response—be it real or perceived—that deviates from China’s preferred political narrative about the election will likely garner a very harsh Chinese counter-response,” Craig Singleton, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington think tank, told a recent conference.

Liu, in Washington on Wednesday, met White House deputy national security adviser Jon Finer. One message the U.S. delivered to Liu, a Biden administration official said, was that Beijing shouldn’t try to interfere in Taiwan’s upcoming presidential and legislative elections.

“We oppose any outside interference or influence in Taiwan’s elections,” the official told reporters. The official said the U.S. will send a delegation of former officials to Taiwan after the election and is also keeping channels open to Beijing “to manage this difficult time and try to avoid unintended conflict.”

Tipped as a possible future Chinese foreign minister after almost four decades dealing with international affairs, Liu, who is also traveling to San Francisco, largely reiterated Beijing’s positions on major global issues and the inherent strengths of the Chinese economy while in New York. He also met American financiers and United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres.

The November meeting between Xi Jinping and President Biden in California helped stabilize ties after a rough patch in bilateral relations. PHOTO: KEVIN LAMARQUE/REUTERS

“My visit this time is to have candid exchanges with people from across the American society on how to implement the San Francisco vision,” Liu told members of New York’s Council on Foreign Relations, a think tank, on Tuesday.

Wu Xinbo, dean of the Institute of International Studies at Shanghai’s Fudan University, said the new outreach reflects Beijing’s eagerness to see the Biden administration maintain a positive momentum in relations even during a U.S. election year.

“The San Francisco vision refers to promoting dialogue and cooperation while managing the difficulties, including over the Taiwan issue,” he said.

China cut off military and some other types of communication and cooperation with the U.S. in mid-2022 to protest a visit to Taiwan by then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. The Biden-Xi summit months later helped steady the relationship, but goodwill dissipated when a Chinese balloon was spotted above the U.S. early last year, angering Washington and prompting Beijing to adopt the “return to Bali” language as relations turned icy.

Military talks resumed only in December, following several close encounters at sea and in the skies between the nations’ forces. In a round at the Pentagon this week, the two sides discussed a range of issues related to the South China Sea, North Korea and Ukraine, as the U.S. reaffirmed its commitment to the one-China policy, according to a summary from the Defense Department.

Taiwan will hold presidential elections on Saturday. PHOTO: CHIANG YING-YING/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Now, Chinese diplomats are using this month’s 45th anniversary of the establishment of U.S.-China relations to call on Washington to sustain the more positive mood established in California, which also led to agreements for dialogues and cooperation on issues ranging from artificial intelligence to the opioid fentanyl. The Foreign Ministry even pointed to recent table tennis matches in both the U.S. and China, harking back to the friendlies that marked some of the first links between the countries in the 1970s.

In addressing an anniversary reception in Beijing, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi recently said that the U.S.-China relationship is the world’s most consequential and that it needs to be calibrated for transformations not seen in a century, Xi’s reference to the growing power of developing countries, including China.

He said the two sides should see San Francisco as a new starting point and called on the U.S. to respect China’s development path rather than tie itself in knots over it. “We hope that the U.S. side will go easy on itself,” he said.

In an interview with a Chinese television network this week, China’s ambassador to the U.S., Xie Feng, said that after the consensus reached in San Francisco with great difficulty, the nations should work as partners. He urged the U.S. to abandon its view of China as a rival, what Beijing terms “Cold War thinking.”

“The important thing is still the correct perception,” Xie said.

Is a Leading Ukraine Skeptic Influencing White House Policy?

kyivpost.com

Samuel Charap, an influential proponent of Kyiv-Moscow negotiations, who has long been skeptical of Ukraine’s ability to win the war, evidently has an in with the White House.

by Jason Jay Smart, Hether Beck | January 10, 2024, 1:08 pm

Samuel Charap. PHOTO: Screenshot

Kyiv Post has discovered that Samuel Charap, one of the most prominent Ukraine skeptics among American foreign policy analysts, has been a regular visitor to the White House’s National Security Council (NSC) during the past three years of the Biden Administration. Charap has been a stalwart advocate of Kyiv negotiating with Moscow since the early days of Russia’s invasion in 2014 and a frequent voice in media and international political circles questioning the logic of arming Ukraine.

The NSC, which operates from the West Wing of the White House, is headed by Jake Sullivan, who is Biden’s point man on Ukraine, under whom Charap earlier worked at the US State Department’s Policy Planning Staff before becoming a political scientist at the largely US government-financed Rand Corporation.

In the publicly available White House visitor log, one of Charap’s most recent visits, on July 17, 2023, was listed as an appointment with Jonathan Finer, Deputy National Security Advisor under Sullivan.

White House visitor log indicates that Charap has been a frequent visitor to the Biden Administration.

Here are some examples of his most recent writings, especially since Feb. 24, 2022. They clearly demonstrate an ongoing opposition to arming Ukraine and call instead for negotiations with Russia:

As hundreds of thousands of Russian troops amassed along the Ukrainian border in January 2022, Samuel Charap published an article for Foreign Policy titled, “The West’s Weapons Won’t Make Any Difference to Ukraine,” arguing that “US military equipment wouldn’t realistically help Ukrainians – or intimidate Putin,” which closely echoed previous statements from Charap.
Back in 2014, half-a-year after Russia began its illegal invasion and occupation of Crimea and the Donbas in Eastern Ukraine, Charap wrote a piece for Foreign Policy called “Why Ukraine Must Bargain for Peace With Russia: “The ‘let’s make a deal’ moment has arrived for Kiev [sic] and Moscow. But by pushing a hard-line agenda against Putin, the United States and Europe are only making things worse for Ukraine,” he said, contending that “Ukraine needs to make a deal with Russia if it wants to survive this crisis.”
In 2016, after the initial invasion had sunk in, Charap and Jeremy Shapiro authored “How to Avoid a New Cold War” for the Brookings Institute, in which they seemingly blame the West for Putin’s illegal actions: “The response thus far has seemed more focused on punishing Russia and its leaders for their moral transgressions than on addressing the problems in Western-Russian relations that led to this impasse.”
In the summer of 2023, as President Zelensky was thanking Denmark for committing to send F-16s to Ukraine, Charap published another opinion piece, “An Unwinnable War: Washington Needs an Endgame in Ukraine” criticizing the West for being more focused on providing military aid and economic assistance than a diplomatic resolution.
In “Should Ukraine Negotiate with Russia,” published by Foreign Affairs in July 2023, Charap argued, “But in international politics, one does not get to choose one’s interlocutors. And there is no plausible path to ending the war that does not entail engaging Moscow. So eventually, Washington, Kyiv, Berlin, and others will have to try. This would not be the first time the United States talked to a nefarious regime with a history of deceit in order to stop a war.”
The New Yorker magazine’s The Case for Negotiating with Russia in August 2023 quotes Charap as saying “It’s not necessarily that I think Ukraine needs to make concessions,” but “I don’t see the alternative to that eventually happening.” Meanwhile, in the fall of 2023, as US Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman, Gen. Mark Milley was touting that Ukraine had successfully liberated over 54 percent of Russian-occupied Ukraine and they continue to retain the strategic initiative.
Finally, Charap has been a vocal supporter of a Korean War-type armistice, where there is no declared end or victory. It should be noted, however, that an ongoing conflict would preclude Ukraine from qualification to become a NATO member, a central objective of President Zelensky’s government.

Given the controversial nature of Charap’s commentary over the years, there is plenty of reason for concern, as it becomes known that the White House visitor log shows him as visiting staff a total of three times in 2021, and nine in 2022. In 2023, he visited the White House at least eight times, however, not all 2023 records have yet been published by the Federal Government.

Cautioning against war fatigue, Buffett notes that Ukraine is currently fighting-back three of America's greatest enemies: Russia, Iran, and North Korea.

Most meetings were small. However, one meeting in August 2022 had 86 attendees recorded on the government roster, including President Biden.

What changes in US foreign policy Charap influenced is not fully known. However, as murmurs abound that the US has abandoned the “for as long as it takes” promise, potentially in an attempt to coerce Kyiv into a negotiating posture, the role that staunchly pro-negotiation Charap has played will come further under the microscope.

When Kyiv Post contacted Samuel Charap’s office with a set of questions, he largely brushed us off with the exception of a few responses like these:

Kyiv Post: Given past successes and failures for Putin with international agreements, why do you think an agreement with Ukraine now would be effective? And what would you see as an effective mechanism for punishing breach of contract?

Charap: It is not possible to assess the effectiveness of a hypothetical agreement before negotiations have even begun. There are a range of mechanisms that have been used to address non-compliance with international agreements. The snapback clauses in the JCPOA are one example.

Kyiv Post: For the US today, do you prioritize encouraging and supporting negotiations over supplying arms to Ukraine? How have your thoughts on this question changed since Feb 2022? Since 2014?

Charap: Please see [reference to a piece in Foreign Affairs], which says, in part:

“Starting talks does not require stopping the fight. Conducting negotiations is not the opposite of applying coercive pressure. In fact, negotiations are the means by which states can turn that pressure into leverage to accomplish their goals. As Thomas Schelling wrote in his classic ‘Arms and Influence’: ‘The power to hurt is bargaining power. To exploit it is diplomacy – vicious diplomacy, but diplomacy.’ Talks are an instrument for a warring state to further the same objectives it seeks on the battlefield. Historically, they have often taken place during periods of intense fighting. Nowhere in my article do I suggest that Ukraine would have to stop fighting – or that the West would have to cease supporting that fight – in order to start talks.”

Kyiv Post asked Tomasz Nadrowski, host of the “Tyranny Today” podcast to comment on Charap’s responses.

“The problem with both of Charap’s responses here is that they make too many general assumptions about geopolitical negotiations in general, and certainly too many assumptions when it comes to the triangle of relationships between the US, Ukraine and Russia,” he said.

The Polish-born US foreign affairs specialist elaborated:“First of all, Charap assumes that Putin is willing to negotiate in good faith. Second, he assumes that Ukrainians want to negotiate. He also makes assumptions about Russia’s willingness to commit to a set of achievable goals for negotiations; this is a problem given that Russia’s publicly stated goals for the conflict have changed over and over again from the removal of neo-nazism to fighting Western domination to expansionist plans to roll farther into Eastern Europe. Ukraine, on the other hand, had been steadfast in stating its goals with President Zelensky’s well-documented 10-point peace plan.”

Nadrowski, concludes: “Finally, I will say that it’s naive, given all I said above, to think that Ukraine and Russia should or even could participate in serious formal negotiations today. But there are certainly back-channel means for the two nations to hold discussions that could set the stage for future negotiations. In fact, I would be stunned if those back-channel conversations aren’t going on as I write this. On the other hand, if those back-channel conversations are happening, these views expressed by Mr. Charap on Ukraine/Russia negotiations, particularly when also stated in prestigious publications like Foreign Affairs and the New Yorker, might actually do a lot more harm than good.”

The White House could not be reached for comment.

Additional reporting by Gregg Stebben.

kyivpost.com

3. South Africa tells the UN top court Israel is committing genocide in Gaza as a landmark case begins

South Africa tells the UN top court Israel is committing genocide in Gaza as a landmark case begins

BY MIKE CORDER

Updated 5:22 AM EST, January 11, 2024

AP · January 11, 2024

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — A continent away from the fighting between Israel and Hamas, South Africa told judges at the United Nations’ top court on Thursday that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza and pleaded with the court to urgently order Israel to halt its military operation. Israel has vehemently denied such arguments.

South African lawyers said the latest Gaza war is part of a decades-long oppression of the Palestinians by Israel.

Israel has vehemently denied such arguments even ahead of the opening arguments at the U.N. court in The Hague.

Lawyers for South Africa asked judges at Thursday’s hearings to impose binding preliminary orders on Israel, including an immediate halt to Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.

“Genocides are never declared in advance, but this court has the benefit of the past 13 weeks of evidence that shows incontrovertibly a pattern of conduct and related intention that justifies as a plausible claim of genocidal acts,” South African lawyer Adila Hassim told the judges and audience in the packed, ornate room of the Peace Palace in The Hague.

“Nothing will stop the suffering except an order from this court. Without an indication of provisional measures, the atrocities will continue, with the Israeli Defense Force indicating that it intends pursuing this course of action for at least a year,” she said.

Ahead of the proceedings, hundreds of pro-Israeli protesters marched close to the courthouse with banners saying “Bring them home,” referring to the hostages still held by Hamas. Among the crowds, people were holding Israeli and Dutch flags.

Smoke rises following an Israeli bombardment on Rafah, southern Gaza Strip, Wednesday, Dec. 20, 2023. (AP Photo/Fatima Shbair, File)

Outside the court, others were protesting and waving the Palestinian flag in support of South Africa’s move.

The dispute strikes at the heart of Israel’s national identity as a Jewish state created in the aftermath of the Nazi genocide in the Holocaust.

It also involves South Africa’s identity: Its governing party, the African National Congress, has long compared Israel’s policies in Gaza and the West Bank to its own history under the apartheid regime of white minority rule, which restricted most Blacks to “homelands” before ending in 1994.

Smoke rises following an Israeli bombardment in the Gaza Strip, as seen from southern Israel, Saturday, Dec. 16, 2023. (AP Photo/Ariel Schalit, File)

Although it normally considers U.N. and international tribunals unfair and biased, Israel has sent a strong legal team to defend its military operation launched in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas.

South Africa immediately sought to broaden the case beyond the narrow confines of the ongoing Israel-Hamas war.

“The violence and the destruction in Palestine and Israel did not begin on Oct. 7, 2023. The Palestinians have experienced systematic oppression and violence for the last 76 years,” said South African Justice Minister Ronald Lamola.

Vusimuzi Madonsela, the co-leader of South Africa’s delegation said that “at the outset, South Africa acknowledges that the genocidal acts and omissions by the state of Israel inevitably form part of a continuum of illegal acts perpetrated against the people of Palestinian people. since 1948,” when Israel declared its independence.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a video statement Wednesday night defending his country’s actions and insisted they had nothing to do with genocide.

Injured Palestinians arrive at al-Shifa Hospital following Israeli airstrikes on Gaza City, central Gaza Strip, Monday, Oct. 16, 2023. (AP Photo/Abed Khaled, File)

“Israel has no intention of permanently occupying Gaza or displacing its civilian population,” he said. “Israel is fighting Hamas terrorists, not the Palestinian population, and we are doing so in full compliance with international law.”

He said the Israeli military is “doing its utmost to minimize civilian casualties, while Hamas is doing its utmost to maximize them by using Palestinian civilians as human shields.”

In the opening session in The Hague, South Africa called for the court to issue an interim order for an immediate halt to Israel’s military actions. A decision will likely take weeks.

Israel’s offensive has killed more than 23,200 Palestinians in Gaza, according to the Health Ministry in Hamas-run Gaza. About two-thirds of the dead are women and children, health officials say. The death toll does not distinguish between combatants and civilians.

“Mothers, fathers, children, siblings, grandparents, aunts, cousins are often all killed together. This killing is nothing short of destruction of Palestinian life. It is inflicted deliberately. No one is spared. Not even newborn babies,” said Hassim.

An Israeli mobile artillery unit fires a shell from southern Israel towards the Gaza Strip, in a position near the Israel-Gaza border on Thursday, Dec. 14, 2023. (AP Photo/Leo Correa, File)

Finding food, water, medicine and working bathrooms has become a daily struggle for Palestinians living in Gaza. Last week, the U.N. humanitarian chief called Gaza “uninhabitable” and said, “People are facing the highest levels of food insecurity ever recorded (and) famine is around the corner.” Israel itself has always focused attention on the Oct. 7 attacks themselves, when Hamas fighters stormed through several communities in Israel and killed some 1,200 people, mainly civilians. They abducted around 250 others, nearly half of whom have been released.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken dismissed the case as “ meritless ” during a visit to Tel Aviv on Tuesday.

“It is particularly galling, given that those who are attacking Israel — Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, as well as their supporter Iran — continue to call for the annihilation of Israel and the mass murder of Jews,” he said.

The world court, which rules on disputes between nations, has never judged a country to be responsible for genocide. The closest it came was in 2007 when it ruled that Serbia “violated the obligation to prevent genocide” in the July 1995 massacre by Bosnian Serb forces of more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the Bosnian enclave of Srebrenica.

The International Criminal Court, based a few miles (kilometers) away in The Hague, prosecutes individuals for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.

The case revolves around the genocide convention that was drawn up in 1948 in the aftermath of World War II and the murder of 6 million Jews in the Holocaust. Both Israel and South Africa are signatories.

Israel is back on the International Court of Justice’s docket next month, when hearings open into a U.N. request for a non-binding advisory opinion on the legality of Israeli policies in the West Bank and east Jerusalem.

AP · January 11, 2024

4. South Africa Takes Israel to Court

Excerpts:

Unlike previous cases at the International Criminal Court, which Israel has boycotted because it does not recognize that court’s authority, Israel has no choice but to appear in front of the ICJ as it is a signatory to the Genocide Convention and subject to the jurisdiction of the ICJ, the United Nations’ top legal body. Both sides are sending some of their best lawyers to The Hague. Pretoria is sending South African international law expert John Dugard, a former U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories. Meanwhile, Israel will be represented at the ICJ by the British lawyer Malcolm Shaw, an expert on territorial disputes.

Israel is also sending Aharon Barak, a retired Israeli Supreme Court president who is a Holocaust survivor and a fierce critic of the Netanyahu government’s judicial reform plan—which adds to his credibility in the eyes of Netanyahu’s critics.

The application also raises possible reputational damage for the United States. As the International Crisis Group’s Brian Finucane argues “U.S. officials risk complicity if Israel uses U.S. support to commit war crimes.” The United States is increasingly isolated as one of the few countries that has stood resolutely behind Israel since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack and subsequent Israeli offensive in the Gaza Strip amid growing international criticism over the dire humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

“We find this submission meritless, counterproductive, and completely without any basis in fact whatsoever,” White House National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said last Wednesday.

Israel and South Africa’s animosity has deep roots. After Israel was founded, the country’s leaders cultivated close ties with newly independent African states while often condemning apartheid in South Africa. However, relations with most African nations soured after the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, while Israel’s ties with South Africa grew stronger as it began to sell large quantities of arms to the apartheid regime. Israel became a key ally and defense partner for the white supremacist government during the 1970s and 1980s, even as other countries began to impose sanctions on Pretoria. In November, South Africa’s Parliament voted to suspend diplomatic ties with the country until a cease-fire agreement in Gaza is reached.

South Africa Takes Israel to Court

Pretoria accuses the Israeli government of genocide before the ICJ in The Hague.

Gbadamosi-Nosmot-foreign-policy-columnist10

Nosmot Gbadamosi

By Nosmot Gbadamosi, a multimedia journalist and the writer of Foreign Policy’s weekly Africa Brief.

Foreign Policy · by Nosmot Gbadamosi

Nosmot Gbadamosi

January 10, 2024, 3:33 AM

Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Africa Brief.

The highlights this week: DRC opposition disputes election results, Ethiopia and Somaliland sign a controversial deal on Red Sea access, and Senegal’s Supreme Court rejects Sonko’s appeal.

If you would like to receive Africa Brief in your inbox every Wednesday, please sign up here.

Can South Africa Win Its Case Against Israel?

South Africa’s application to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) seeking to have the court declare Israel’s military assault on Gaza a genocide will be heard starting on Thursday in The Hague.

Israel has called the allegations “baseless” and accused South Africa of “cooperating with a terrorist organization.”

States including Turkey and Jordan have backed the case. Malaysia publicly offered South Africa its support. Malaysia’s Foreign Ministry described the proceedings as a “timely and tangible step towards legal accountability for Israel’s atrocities.”

Israel finds it is having to defend itself against arguments based on a convention that was drawn up in part to prevent a repetition of the Holocaust, which killed 6 million Jews.

The application asked the ICJ to take interim measures to immediately suspend Israel’s military operations in Gaza and “take all reasonable measures” to prevent genocide. In its 84-page brief, South Africa cites alleged incitement by top Israeli officials, including the defense minister, Yoav Gallant, who referred to Palestinians in Gaza as “human animals,” as well as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s comparison of Palestinians to the biblical story of the Amalek nation, which God ordered the Israelites to destroy.

Pretoria argues Israel’s military assault violates its obligations under the 1948 Genocide Convention, which defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group.”

The application condemns Hamas’s killing of 1,200 Israelis and foreign citizens and hostage-taking of around 247 people on Oct. 7 but argues that no attack can justify the killing of more than 22,000 Palestinians, including over 7,000 children—the number of dead at the time it was written.

Unlike previous cases at the International Criminal Court, which Israel has boycotted because it does not recognize that court’s authority, Israel has no choice but to appear in front of the ICJ as it is a signatory to the Genocide Convention and subject to the jurisdiction of the ICJ, the United Nations’ top legal body. Both sides are sending some of their best lawyers to The Hague. Pretoria is sending South African international law expert John Dugard, a former U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories. Meanwhile, Israel will be represented at the ICJ by the British lawyer Malcolm Shaw, an expert on territorial disputes.

Israel is also sending Aharon Barak, a retired Israeli Supreme Court president who is a Holocaust survivor and a fierce critic of the Netanyahu government’s judicial reform plan—which adds to his credibility in the eyes of Netanyahu’s critics.

The application also raises possible reputational damage for the United States. As the International Crisis Group’s Brian Finucane argues “U.S. officials risk complicity if Israel uses U.S. support to commit war crimes.” The United States is increasingly isolated as one of the few countries that has stood resolutely behind Israel since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack and subsequent Israeli offensive in the Gaza Strip amid growing international criticism over the dire humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

“We find this submission meritless, counterproductive, and completely without any basis in fact whatsoever,” White House National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said last Wednesday.

Israel and South Africa’s animosity has deep roots. After Israel was founded, the country’s leaders cultivated close ties with newly independent African states while often condemning apartheid in South Africa. However, relations with most African nations soured after the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, while Israel’s ties with South Africa grew stronger as it began to sell large quantities of arms to the apartheid regime. Israel became a key ally and defense partner for the white supremacist government during the 1970s and 1980s, even as other countries began to impose sanctions on Pretoria. In November, South Africa’s Parliament voted to suspend diplomatic ties with the country until a cease-fire agreement in Gaza is reached.

The South African government, faced with domestic issues at home, has tried to assert itself as a moral beacon in the world, calling out the hypocrisy of the West over the war in Ukraine and campaigning for a multipolar global order where poorer nations have a voice.

While it is easy for some analysts to dismiss South Africa’s case, any ruling could set legal precedents since Pretoria is basing its petition in part on Gambia’s proceedings against Myanmar in 2020, in which Gambia successfully argued as party to the Genocide Convention that it has an obligation to act to prevent genocide against the ethnic Rohingya population in Rakhine State and therefore had standing. Myanmar had tried to argue that Gambia was not an “injured” party and therefore could not bring a case.

Since the war began, Israel has restricted the entry of medicine, water, and fuel to Gaza’s population of 2.3 million people, except for limited aid through Egypt that U.N. workers say falls far short of what’s needed with famine and disease around the corner.

By not seeking a definitive ruling—but only provisional measures under Article 74 of the ICJ rules—the threshold of what South Africa has to prove is lowered. The court could decide it does have jurisdiction to proceed with the case as in The Gambia v. Myanmar. It could also choose to impose some of the interim measures requested by South Africa without making a decision that Israel’s conduct in Gaza amounts to genocide.

Although ICJ orders are binding, they’ve not been enforceable. Russia has defied the court’s judgment to suspend military operations in Ukraine. Regardless of the ICJ’s eventual decision, Israel is becoming more isolated on the world stage.

The Week Ahead

Thursday, Jan. 11, to Friday, Jan. 12: South Africa’s petition accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza is heard by the ICJ in The Hague.

Saturday, Jan. 13: The 34th edition of the Africa Cup of Nations soccer tournament begins in the Ivory Coast, where the host nation takes on Guinea-Bissau.

Sunday, Jan. 14: Comoros holds presidential elections.

Wednesday, Jan. 17: Former Sierra Leone President Ernest Bai Koroma goes to court on charges of treason in connection with a failed coup in November 2023.

What We’re Watching

Hemeti’s Africa tour. Sudan recalled its ambassador from Nairobi on Thursday in protest of Kenyan President William Ruto’s hosting of talks with the leader of Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), Mohamed Hamdan “Hemeti” Dagalo. Hemeti has been touring African countries on his first known tour abroad since war broke out in April with the Sudanese Army led by Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan.

On Friday, he met with Rwandan President Paul Kagame and later visited the Genocide Memorial Museum in the Rwandan capital, Kigali, which angered many Sudanese. The RSF has been accused of carrying out mass atrocities including systematic ethnic cleansing and rape. He has also visited South Africa, Uganda, Ethiopia, and Djibouti at a time when the Sudanese Army has lost ground to the RSF, which now controls most of the capital, Khartoum, nearly all of Darfur, and the city of Wad Madani. The war has displaced 7.3 million people.

Ethiopia’s Red Sea access. Somalia’s president, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, on Saturday signed a bill nullifying a landmark preliminary deal between Ethiopia and the breakaway region of Somaliland.

Somaliland signed a pact last week to lease landlocked Ethiopia port access to the Red Sea and a naval base in the Gulf of Aden in exchange for Addis Ababa recognizing Somaliland as a sovereign state. Somaliland declared independence from Somalia in 1991 and established its own parliament and presidential elections but is not internationally recognized as a separate country. Somalis in the capital, Mogadishu, protested against the deal. The Somali government recalled its ambassador to Ethiopia and lambasted the deal as a “hostile move” and a breach of Somalia’s “territorial integrity.”

It seems the pact has also ruffled Somaliland ministers. Defense Minister Abdiqani Mohamoud Ateye resigned in protest and criticized Somaliland President Muse Bihi Abdi “for not consulting the council of ministers on the port deal with Ethiopia,” saying they “heard about it from the media.”

Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has previously sparked a row with Eritrea over port access to the Red Sea, raising tensions in an already volatile Horn of Africa. The Arab League has come out in support of Somalia; meanwhile, the African Union urged both sides to de-escalate tensions. United Arab Emirates-based DP World had upgraded Somaliland’s Berbera port since winning a 30-year concession to run it in 2016 despite objections from Somalia. The UAE provided extensive military support to Ethiopia during its war with Tigray and is likely to unofficially support the deal.

Formal recognition by Ethiopia could allow Somaliland to begin lobbying other nations to recognize it—particularly in its business dealings. It also sets back hopes of a peaceful resolution between Somalia and Somaliland after both sides had agreed to work toward reaching a sustainable solution during talks in Djibouti last month.

Canceled votes in DRC election. The Democratic Republic of the Congo’s election commission has disqualified 82 candidates over alleged fraud and violence in the contested general election that took place Dec. 20. However, the opposition has called the entire election a “sham” and demanded a rerun amid widespread logistical problems and claims of electoral irregularities. President Félix Tshisekedi was reelected for a second term with 73 percent of the vote, according to the electoral commission’s published results.

Former provincial governor Moise Katumbi gained 18 percent of votes and Martin Fayulu, a former oil executive, received 5 percent. Tshisekedi came to office in 2019 after a disputed election that many international and local observers said he had lost to Fayulu. The country’s Constitutional Court heard a challenge to annul the presidential results submitted last week by Théodore Ngoyi, who came last with 0.02 percent of the vote. The Court rejected the legal challenges and ruled Tuesday that Tshisekedi was the winner.

Senegal elections. Senegal’s Supreme Court on Friday rejected popular opposition leader Ousmane Sonko’s appeal against a libel conviction, potentially ruling him out of next month’s presidential election because of the conviction. Sonko was sentenced to six months in prison in May 2023 for defaming Minister of Tourism Mame Mbaye Niang after accusing him of stealing 29 billion CFA francs (about $47 million) from a government agency. In 2021, Sonko was charged with rape and making death threats to a massage parlor employee and subsequently convicted in June 2023 of “corrupting youth”—a crime that involves using one’s position of power to have sex with or encourage the debauchery of an individual under the age of 21—a lesser offense than the initial rape charge.

Sonko’s supporters say the convictions are politically motivated to eliminate him from the presidential race. Senegal’s Constitutional Council is set to publish a final list of cleared presidential candidates on Jan. 20.

This Week in Money

Chad’s new interim prime minister, Succès Masra, a former opposition politician who joined the military administration, said he is giving up his salary. He announced on state TV that he would be donating his pay toward social scholarships in Chadian communities. Not long after, transitional legislator Bedei Toullomi announced he would also give up 50 percent of his salary. Masra recently returned from exile after staunchly opposing the military rule of Mahamat Idriss Déby. Opposition members accuse Masra of dashing hope of democracy by accepting the prime minister post and legitimizing the Déby dynasty.

What We’re Reading

Western Sahara’s forgotten conflict. The collapse of a 29-year cease-fire in 2020 marked a resurgence of simmering conflict between Morocco and the Polisario Front over the sovereignty of the Western Sahara. Pesha Magid and Andrea Prada Bianchi argue in New Lines Magazine that the world has largely ignored and forgotten this conflict. “The Sahrawi people have been stuck in diplomatic limbo while living in the refugee camps in Algeria,” they write.

Egypt’s cinematic history. The first-ever cinema show in Africa and the Arab region was screened at the Café Zawani in the Egyptian city Alexandria in November 1896. Egypt’s role in the movie industry became one of the most significant forms of its soft power, writes Mohamed Helal in Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism. But censorship, state control, and monopolization have stifled the sector. In 1958, there were more than 350 cinemas in the country, but that number had fallen to just 53 in 2020, according to Egypt’s statistics agency.

Foreign Policy · by Nosmot Gbadamosi

5. Xi’s Chief of Staff Is Quietly Amassing Even More Power in China

Chiefs of Staff everywhere saying, yeah, I influence the boss that way. I am the power behind the throne. (note sarcasm).

Graphics and charts at the link.

Excerpts:

As Cai got promoted, he showered his boss with praise: He was one of the first officials to publicly refer to Xi in equal terms to Mao, saying that he was “piloting at the helm” — a phrase previously reserved for Mao.

That loyalty was rewarded when Xi in 2022 smashed party norms to extend his own rule and promote trusted lieutenants, a move that saw Cai elevated to the elite Standing Committee. Months later, he was appointed Xi’s top aide, gaining more access to the president.

“That face time allows him to exercise subtle influence on Xi’s thinking,” said Neil Thomas, a fellow for Chinese politics at the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis, adding that Cai is now the top official most focused on national security.

Xi’s Chief of Staff Is Quietly Amassing Even More Power in China

Cai Qi is first No. 5 to also be top aide since Mao era
Two men worked together for decades in coastal provinces

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-10/xi-s-chief-of-staff-is-quietly-amassing-even-more-power-in-china?utm=true&sref=hhjZtX76

When President Xi Jinping held talks in California with his US counterpart Joe Biden in November, seated to his right was a man who is quietly emerging as one of China’s most influential politicians.

Cai Qi wields unusual clout for China’s No. 5 official. Not only does he sit on the seven-man Politburo Standing Committee, China’s most powerful body, but he also serves as Xi’s chief of staff — making him the first person to hold both positions since the Mao Zedong era.

Those dual titles have given Cai another privilege: He’s the only member of China’s top decision-making body to publicly travel overseas with Xi during his decade-plus in power. Standing Committee members traditionally do not accompany Chinese leaders abroad as they manage their own portfolios.

That little-noticed shift in party norms saw Cai join his boss in some of his most important meetings of 2023. Besides the talks with Biden, which Xi used to boost investor confidence in the world’s second-largest economy, Cai also attended overseas summits with Russia’s Vladimir Putin and South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa last year.

On top of that, Xi has brought Cai — who worked with the Chinese leader for two decades in coastal provinces before he took power — deeper into the national security universe, often considered the president’s top priority. In May, state media revealed Cai had been named as a deputy chair of the ruling party’s National Security Commission, an opaque organ led by Xi that previously had just two deputies, the nation’s second- and third-ranked officials.

“It’s obvious Cai enjoys exceptional trust and empowerment from the supreme leader,” said Wen-Ti Sung, nonresident fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub. “That’s rare even among top-level Chinese officials today.”

Cai’s higher profile puts the fifth-ranked official on a similar standing to China’s No. 2, Premier Li Qiang, as Xi continues to break norms after stacking the party’s top body with loyalists. His reliance on both men suggests his inner circle remains stable even as he conducts a high-profile purge of the military and has ousted his foreign and defense ministers.

China’s State Council Information Office didn’t reply to a request for comment about Cai’s status and role in Xi’s security drive.

Unlike Xi, the son of a revolutionary hero, Cai wasn’t born into an elite ruling family. But his career overlap with the president appears to have catapulted him up the Communist Party’s leadership ladder.

The two men first crossed paths in Fujian province in the 1980s, before they moved to wealthy Zhejiang at the turn of the century. People who worked with Cai in the latter, where he reached as high as executive vice governor level, remember him as intelligent and approachable, according to a person familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified commenting on senior party figures.

Back then, Cai was a prolific social media user with 10 million followers who brought attention to issues such as youth suicide. In one post, he even advocated for an “open and transparent” government “supervised by the public.”

Cai Qi's Rapid Rise

The No. 5 official's career has accelerated during Xi Jinping's rule

Source: Bloomberg reporting

After Xi became leader, Cai’s online accounts went silent and his public persona hardened, as he was called to Beijing to serve on China’s top national security commission.

Within three years, he was propelled onto the top-decision making Politburo, a rare leap for an official who had never even served in the much larger Central Committee, normally a prerequisite. In 2017, Cai became Beijing’s party chief, in charge of securing the home of the nation’s top rulers.

Early into that role, Cai earned a reputation as a hardliner. After a deadly fire threw a spotlight on the capital’s poorer population, he vowed to “see blood” in a campaign against illegal migrant dwellings that left thousands homeless, and drew widespread public criticism.

During the pandemic, Beijing avoided going into lockdown, unlike neighboring Shanghai. That feat was more impressive given the city held the 2022 Winter Olympics, erecting a so-called Covid bubble for foreign athletes to shield the local population from possible infections. Later that year, the capital convened thousands of people for a leadership congress, as Cai imposed strict testing requirements and limits on movement.

Cai's Career History With Xi

Source: state media reports

As Cai got promoted, he showered his boss with praise: He was one of the first officials to publicly refer to Xi in equal terms to Mao, saying that he was “piloting at the helm” — a phrase previously reserved for Mao.

That loyalty was rewarded when Xi in 2022 smashed party norms to extend his own rule and promote trusted lieutenants, a move that saw Cai elevated to the elite Standing Committee. Months later, he was appointed Xi’s top aide, gaining more access to the president.

“That face time allows him to exercise subtle influence on Xi’s thinking,” said Neil Thomas, a fellow for Chinese politics at the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis, adding that Cai is now the top official most focused on national security.

Xi Jinping and Cai Qi, second from left.Source: Bloomberg

Cai’s role as China’s No. 5 also makes him the highest ranked official on a body in charge of convening the Politburo, and gives him responsibility for party ideology, including implementing Xi’s doctrines on everything from education to culture.

While Cai may have unusual influence for his rank, his sway is contingent on maintaining close ties with Xi, said Steve Tsang, director of the SOAS China Institute.

“Cai’s power comes from enjoying the confidence and patronage of Xi,” he added. “The security of a hatchet man rests ultimately on retaining the trust of the supreme leader.”

— With assistance from John Liu and Josh Xiao

6. Taiwan bombarded with cyberattacks ahead of election

How does this fit into China's so-called "San Francisco vision?"

China's words on the "vision" here: “The San Francisco vision refers to promoting dialogue and cooperation while managing the difficulties, including over the Taiwan issue,” he said.

Taiwan bombarded with cyberattacks ahead of election

By MAGGIE MILLER and JOSEPH GEDEON

01/11/2024 05:00 AM EST

Politico

Cybersecurity groups link the attacks against Taiwanese critical infrastructure to China.

Supporters cheer for the Democratic Progressive Party during an elections rally in New Taipei City, Taiwan, on Jan. 6. | Ng Han Guan/AP

01/11/2024 05:00 AM EST

Taiwan faces a deluge of cyberattacks days before a critical presidential election with experts blaming China for an unprecedented and increasingly sophisticated level of interference.

The Jan. 13 election is the first real security test of 2024 — one of the biggest years for democratic elections in history — and underlines the rising cyber threat posed by China.

Google Cloud’s cyber threat intelligence firm Mandiant warned Tuesday of a “substantial volume of espionage operations” by China against Taiwan’s government, technology and critical infrastructure, according to a statement from Ben Read, the company’s head of cyber espionage analysis. “While this type of targeting has occurred for years, the volume over the past few months has been notable.”

Cyberattacks designed to overwhelm and crash networks in Taiwan have reached new levels in the final quarter of 2023, spiking 3,370 percent — a more than thirty fold increase — since the previous year, according to a new threat report from website security firm Cloudflare. While the report did not directly link the attacks to China, it did note that China is one of the largest sources of these types of attacks.

Taiwanese Vice President Lai Ching-te, who is running for president, has called attempted interference by China in this year’s election “ the most serious ever.”

And the attacks are getting harder to gauge due to the rise of artificial intelligence-powered content, which allows cyberattacks and influence campaigns to flood the digital space at a much higher clip. China, a world-leader in new AI development and investment, appears to wield the tech with a clear, vested interest in influencing Taiwan’s future and the world’s opinion on the island’s sovereignty.

“The number and types of attacks China wages against Taiwan are very different from what they deploy to other nations,” former FBI Executive Assistant Director of Information and Technology James Turgal said in an interview.

Turgal calls the strategy an “embarrassment campaign,” where China infiltrates a system not to steal data but to post degrading statements that make Taipei’s institutions look bad.

“You basically manipulate and take over the website and put up anti-Taiwan statements on government sites that are forward-facing — which is a type of attack you don’t see against U.S. interests,” he said. “You saw a lot of those just before Russia entered Ukraine.”

Liu Pengyu, spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, D.C., called the allegations of Chinese cyberattacks against Taiwan “clearly disinformation” in an emailed statement. “The Chinese government’s position on cybersecurity is consistent and clear. We firmly oppose and combat cyberattacks of any kind,” Liu said.

Liu added that Beijing hopes the ballot will “be conducive to cross-Strait peace and stability.”

The Chinese government views Taiwan as a renegade province rather than an independent nation, and tensions have reached new heights under Chinese President Xi Jinping. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs regularly declines questions on Taiwan, citing the belief that Taiwan is not a foreign policy issue for China as the island belongs to the nation. The ministry, instead, has publicly accused the U.S. of being a “hacker empire.”

Chinese officials, during defense talks this week in Washington, said “China will not make any concession or compromise on the Taiwan question” and asked the U.S. to “not support Taiwan independence,” according to a statement from China’s defense ministry.

Taiwanese officials say the threats from China have grown increasingly intense. Authorities recently observed four alleged Chinese spy balloons directly above the island for the first time and are investigating alleged sponsored trips for hundreds of politicians to China aimed at swaying the vote toward Beijing, according to Reuters.

Roy Chun Lee, Taiwan’s deputy minister of foreign affairs, told POLITICO in November that Taiwan’s public sector sustains more than 13 million cyberattacks every month. Ahead of the election, he said, these attacks were only increasing.

“Every day there are attempts to find loopholes and backdoors in our system,” he said.

Because Taiwan votes on paper ballots, election equipment isn’t the main concern. Instead, U.S. officials and cybersecurity experts say Chinese cyberattacks have focused on behind-the-scenes optics to delegitimize Taiwan’s democratic stake in the island by weaving discord and disinformation.

Scott McConnell, a spokesperson for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which protects U.S. elections against cyber threats, declined to comment on any aid the agency is providing to Taiwan to defend against election threats. The White House did not respond to a request for comment on its coordination with Taiwan.

But the attacks have drawn its attention. President Joe Biden reportedly warned Xi in San Francisco last year not to get involved in Taiwan’s elections.

“I made it clear: I didn’t expect any interference, any at all,” Biden said at a press conference following the meeting. “Look, do I trust? You know, I trust but verify, as the old saying goes.”

Phelim Kine contributed to this report.

POLITICO

Politico

7. Israel Has No Plans to Force Palestinians Out of Gaza or Permanently Occupy It, Netanyahu Says

Israel Has No Plans to Force Palestinians Out of Gaza or Permanently Occupy It, Netanyahu Says

The Israeli leader spoke a day before the International Court of Justice starts hearing a case accusing Israel of genocide

Published 01/10/24 05:18 PM ET|Updated 14 hr ago

Nikhil Kumar

themessenger.com · January 10, 2024

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Wednesday that his country has “no intention of permanently occupying Gaza or displacing its civilian population."

His comments come as the International Court of Justice is set to start hearing South Africa’s case accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza this week.

In a statement posted on X, Netanyahu said Israel - which began its campaign in Gaza in the aftermath of Hamas’ devastating October 7 attack on its territory - “is fighting Hamas terrorists, not the Palestinian population.”

"I want to make a few points absolutely clear: Israel has no intention of permanently occupying Gaza or displacing its civilian population,” he said.

“Israel is fighting Hamas terrorists, not the Palestinian population, and we are doing so in full compliance with international law.”

Netanyahu added: “Our goal is to rid Gaza of Hamas terrorists and free our hostages. Once this is achieved Gaza can be demilitarized and deradicalized, thereby creating a possibility for a better future for Israel and Palestinians alike."

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivers a speech at military headquarters in Tel Aviv, Israel.IsraeliPM/YouTube

Netanyahu’s statement came just a day before a group of international judges start to hear arguments for and against the claim that Israel is engaged in genocide in its campaign against Hamas in Gaza.

South Africa brought the case at the International Court of Justice, the U.N.’s top court, despite fierce opposition from Israel and the U.S.

From Washington’s point of view, the suit is “meritless, counterproductive, and completely without any basis in fact whatsoever,” U.S. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said last week.

Israel, which is sending a legal team to defend itself at the court, has also criticized the case.

South Africa will make its argument Thursday and will be followed by Israel on Friday.

themessenger.com · January 10, 2024

8. China’s Communist party watchdog warns business of graft crackdown

Dennis Wilder's tweet that accompanied this article is useful:

Dennis Wilder偉德寧

@dennisw5

33m

The scale and persistence of corruption in the Chinese system despite 10 years of purges suggests it is endemic. Xi is Sysiphus.

The question is can this be exploited?

China’s Communist party watchdog warns business of graft crackdown

President Xi Jinping to expand anti-corruption campaign to finance, agricultural and pharmaceutical sectors

Financial Times · by Edward White · January 10, 2024

China has warned large swaths of its business world, state sector and ruling Communist party that they face an intensified anti-corruption campaign as President Xi Jinping expands his hallmark crackdown on endemic graft.

In a communique issued on Wednesday, the party’s deeply feared internal watchdog, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, said it would prioritise investigation into the finance, agricultural and pharmaceutical sectors as well as into state-owned enterprises, which play a central role in China’s economy.

The warning followed a speech by Xi on Monday to a meeting of senior leaders in Beijing in which the president, China’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong, called for “tenacity, perseverance and precision” in the fight against corruption.

“It is essential to make it our top priority to crack down on any collusion between officials and businesspeople, combat profit-seeking activities with the help of power, and resolutely prevent interest groups and power groups from infiltrating the political sphere,” state media quoted Xi as saying.

The party discipline commission’s communique name-checked universities, sports and tobacco, sectors dominated by the state, for closer scrutiny. It also highlighted the problem of cross-border corruption and fraudulent official statistics, an issue the justice ministry has previously highlighted as damaging government credibility.

The campaign, the document said, demonstrated the party’s high degree of “self-consciousness about self-purification, self-improvement and self-innovation”.

Experts say Xi’s campaign is popular in China. But many people are wary about claims of success given the problem remains widespread.

In his speech, Xi said that while 10 years of unremitting anti-graft efforts had won an “overwhelming victory”, the situation remained “severe and complex”.

Xi has used the campaign both to root out genuine corruption, which many experts see as endemic in the party-state, as well as to target political rivals and their followers among the CCP’s almost 100mn members.

Since Xi assumed leadership of the party in 2012, investigations have been launched into millions of so-called “tigers and flies” — meaning high and low-ranking officials.

However, since 2017, the campaign has steadily broadened from party institutions and government departments to state-linked organisations and more recently to the private sector.

Over the past six months, the banner of anti-graft has been used to target senior members of China’s military and defence-linked, state-owned enterprises.

Among scores of military and party officials to have fallen under investigation or disappeared from public view are members of the Rocket Force, the arm of the People’s Liberation Army that controls China’s nuclear and conventional missile arsenals.

The CCDI has also increased the number of investigations into alleged corruption within its own ranks.

Financial Times · by Edward White · January 10, 2024

9. American intel officials warn of risk of Hezbollah attacking U.S.

Terrorism from violent extremist organizations will never go away.

American intel officials warn of risk of Hezbollah attacking U.S.

By ERIN BANCO and LARA SELIGMAN

01/10/2024 05:29 PM EST

Politico

Hezbollah has more capability to strike inside the U.S. than other terrorist groups like ISIS, officials say.

Hezbollah fighters attend the funeral of their commander Wissam al-Tawil, in the village of Khirbet Selm, south Lebanon, Tuesday, Jan. 9, 2024. | Hussein Malla/AP

01/10/2024 05:29 PM EST

U.S. officials assess that there’s a rising risk Lebanese Hezbollah militants will strike Americans in the Middle East — and even potentially hit inside the United States, four officials familiar with the intelligence told POLITICO.

The Iran-backed militant group would likely target U.S. personnel in the Middle East first, the officials said. And U.S. intelligence agencies are gathering data on Hezbollah that suggest it could be considering attacks on both U.S. troops or diplomatic personnel overseas, two of the officials said.

The chance for an assault on U.S. soil is also growing as tensions in the region escalate, the officials said.

“Hezbollah could draw on the capability they have … to put people [in] places to do something,” one of the officials said, referring to a potential attack on the U.S. “It is something to be worried about.” The official, like others in this story, was granted anonymity to talk freely about sensitive intelligence.

Officials declined to detail the specific kind of attacks Hezbollah could take but said that the Iranian-backed group has capabilities that other terrorist groups in the region do not. Individuals inspired by the Islamic State or al-Qaeda — but who are not directly connected to the membership of those terrorist groups — have carried out lone-wolf attacks in the U.S. and Europe, officials said. But Hezbollah has an expansive international network that would allow the group to use its operatives to carry out an attack in the United States.

Either scenario — an attack domestically or on troops or diplomats overseas — would deal a blow to the Biden administration which has worked to prevent the Israel-Hamas conflict from broadening into a wider regional war and to keep American forces out of the fray.

It would also likely draw Washington back into the Middle East at a time when it is trying to focus its national security resources on countering China and Russia.

The National Security Council, FBI and the National Counterterrorism Center declined to comment. But senior Biden administration officials have said publicly after Oct. 7 that it believed Tehran and its proxies were not seeking a wider regional war or a confrontation with the U.S.

U.S. troops in the Middle East have already been attacked by multiple other Iranian proxy groups, including Harakat-al-Nujaba, an Iraqi paramilitary group. These militias have launched at least 127 attacks on American forces in Iraq and Syria since Oct. 17. The U.S. has hit back multiple times, including a Jan. 4 drone strike in Baghdad that killed a senior militia member.

It is unclear the extent to which Hezbollah regularly coordinates with these other groups, but top intelligence officials in Washington have determined that it has the same aims of disrupting the American military’s position in the region and seeks opportunities to strike U.S. troops.

Still, Lebanese Hezbollah has so far avoided major attacks on Israel or U.S. troops since the most recent conflict kicked off. The group, however, does have a history of targeting Americans and U.S. interests overseas.

In 2011 and 2012, two U.S.-based operatives allegedly surveilled American and Israeli targets in Panama as well as in New York City. And the Islamic Jihad Organization, which later became part of Hezbollah, attacked the U.S. embassy in Beirut in 1983, killing 63 people.

The State Department has increased security at the embassy in recent weeks to stave off any attack on diplomats based in Lebanon, one of the officials said.

“The Lebanon front is ready to kick off. And these Iranian militia are pounding the U.S. in eastern Syria and Iraq,” said Andrew Tabler, who served as special envoy for Syria engagement at the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs in the Trump administration. “It’s interesting that this is all going on in the background and people are focusing on the Gaza theater, but the war is actually much larger than that.”

Hezbollah and Israeli forces have also clashed on the Israel-Lebanon border following the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas militants on Israel. In the latest clash, Israel on Monday struck Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, killing one of its top commanders. Hezbollah hit back Tuesday, attacking an Israeli army base with explosive drones, according to Reuters. Both Hezbollah and Israel have said they do not want the conflict to escalate but have also vowed to continue defending themselves should the other side strike.

While so far Israel-Hezbollah tensions have been mostly limited to cross-border skirmishes, one U.S. official said there are concerns that the group could respond more strongly if Israel does not do more to slow the death toll in Gaza.

“Iran, Hezbollah and their linked proxies are trying to calibrate their activity, avoiding actions that would open up a concerted second front with the United States or Israel while still exacting costs in the midst of the current conflict,” Christy Abizaid, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, said during a congressional hearing in October. “This is a very fine line to walk, and in the present regional context, their actions carry the potential for miscalculation.”

American officials are working behind the scenes to deescalate tensions, two of the officials said, and to keep U.S. forces out of the fray.

The administration has backed a plan that would move Hezbollah forces away from Israel’s northern border, allowing thousands of Israelis who fled the fighting to return home. But talks have stalled in recent days, one of the officials said.

“This is a moment of profound tension in the region,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Sunday during his visit to the Middle East. “This is a conflict that could easily metastasize.”

Top intelligence officials have testified in recent months about the threats posed by Hezbollah, saying the group has significant capability to carry out overseas terrorist attacks and that its motivation to strike the U.S. has grown following the Trump administration’s 2019 strike that killed Qassem Soleimani, leader of one of Iran’s top military units.

“The arrests of individuals in the United States allegedly linked to Hezbollah’s main overseas terrorist arm, and their intelligence-collection and procurement efforts, demonstrate Hezbollah’s interest in long-term contingency planning activities here in the homeland,” FBI director Chris Wray said in a congressional hearing Nov. 15.

POLITICO

Politico

10. Why China Would Struggle to Invade Taiwan

Please go to the link to view the interactive article and the proper formatting with graphics.

Why China Would Struggle to Invade Taiwan

https://www.cfr.org/article/why-china-would-struggle-invade-taiwan?mc_cid=8f88d8fd90&mc_eid=70bf478f36

cfr.org · by David Sacks

Taiwanese military personnel stand in a line during the Han Kuang military exercise, which simulates China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) invading the island on July 27, 2022, in New Taipei City, Taiwan. Annabelle Chih/Getty Images

Although China’s ambition to gain control of Taiwan is clear, doing so through force would prove enormously difficult and costly.

Taiwanese military personnel stand in a line during the Han Kuang military exercise, which simulates China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) invading the island, on July 27, 2022, in New Taipei City, Taiwan. Annabelle Chih/Getty Images

By , Author

January 10, 2024

Although China continues to state a preference for unifying with Taiwan through peaceful methods, it has never renounced using force. Indeed, for the past two decades its military modernization has focused on developing capabilities that would enable it to forcefully conquer Taiwan, ranging from ballistic missiles to advanced fighter jets and the world’s largest navy. China’s military, the People’s Liberation Army, has increased the scale and sophistication of its military drills around Taiwan in recent years, honing its combat capabilities. As the prospect of gaining control of Taiwan peacefully becomes more remote, with Taiwanese identity rising and Taiwanese interest in unifying with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) declining, China could conclude that using force is the only way to achieve its political objectives.

Why China Wants Taiwan

Although the People’s Republic of China has never ruled Taiwan, its leaders view the island as Chinese territory—a renegade province that must be brought under Beijing’s control, by force if necessary.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping has called unification with Taiwan the “essence” of the country’s “rejuvenation,” which he has stated needs to be achieved by 2049, the one hundredth anniversary of the PRC. Accomplishing that goal militarily, however, would prove highly challenging.

Kevin Frayer/Getty Images

Like Ukraine, Taiwan is a young democracy bordering a much stronger authoritarian power that does not believe it should exist as an independent state. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, many Taiwanese people have concluded that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan needs to be taken seriously.

China is investing huge sums to develop the capability to bring Taiwan under its control by force, if need be. At the same time, invading Taiwan or mounting a successful blockade would be the most complex military operation in modern history, and China’s military has not fought a major war in more than seven decades.

A Treacherous Crossing

To invade Taiwan, China would have to conduct an extraordinarily complex military operation, synchronizing air, land, and sea power as well as electronic and cyberwarfare.

The Taiwan Strait, over ninety miles wide, is incredibly choppy, and due to two monsoon seasons and other extreme weather events, a seaborne invasion is only viable a few months out of the year.

Transporting hundreds of thousands of soldiers across the Taiwan Strait would take weeks and require thousands of ships. Each crossing would take hours, allowing Taiwan to target the ships, mass troops on potential landing sites, and erect barriers.

China would need to shift military assets to its eastern coast and undertake other visible preparations for an invasion, which Taiwan and the United States would likely be able to detect.

A satellite photo shows China’s Longtian military base, which is across the strait from Taiwan and which China would use in an invasion. Image © Planet Labs PBC

Some questions remains about whether China has the naval vessels it would need to invade Taiwan successfully. China’s amphibious fleet is relatively small, and although Beijing will likely turn to civilian ships to sustain and supplement an invading force, those take longer to unload and would be more vulnerable to Taiwanese missiles.

The Eastern Theater Command, which would lead a military operation to take Taiwan, carries out combat training in Zhangzhou, Fujian Province, China, on Aug 27, 2022. CFOTO/Future Publishing/Getty Images

Vehicles enter a passenger roll-on/roll-off ship, which could be used to support military operations, at the port of Yantai, Shandong Province, China, on December 19, 2023. Costfoto/NurPhoto/Getty Images

Few Places to Land

Even if Chinese troops successfully cross the strait, few deep-water ports and beaches in Taiwan could accommodate a large landing force.

Beijing would also have to assume Taiwan could destroy its major ports at a conflict’s outset to prevent an invader from using them.

Taiwan’s west coast has shallow waters extending from most of its beaches, meaning they are not ideal for an invading force.

Taiwan’s east coast is lined by cliffs that are too steep for an invading force to scale. Moving to Taiwan’s major population centers is only possible via a few narrow passes and tunnels, which Taiwan can destroy or defend.

The D-Day operation in World War II was the largest amphibious invasion in military history, involving seven thousand ships and almost two hundred thousand troops who crossed the nearly one-hundred-mile English Channel. Over a period of three-plus weeks, 850,000 troops landed on the beaches of Normandy to liberate France. A Chinese amphibious invasion of Taiwan would likely have to dwarf D-Day in scale.

A bird’s-eye view is shown of landing craft, barrage balloons, and Allied troops landing in Normandy, France, on D-Day. Library of Congress

Due to the shallow water, China would have to anchor ships far from Taiwan’s coast and move equipment to the shores slowly, making the ships vulnerable to Taiwanese missiles and artillery.

Side view of a west coast beach showing the gradient of the beach from underwater to above water and how far a large vessel would have to stop.

Taiwan has also invested in defenses, from mines to anti-landing spikes, and mobile missile launchers.

Soldiers take part in an anti-landing military exercise on a beach in Taoyuan, Taiwan, on March 23, 2023. Annabelle Chih/Reuters

A training naval mine blasts during a military drill at the Zuoying naval base in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, on January 31, 2018. Tyrone Siu/Reuters

A man takes photographs of the Chinese city of Xiamen amid anti-tank fortifications in Kinmen, Taiwan. Chris McGrath/Getty Images

Despite China’s rapid military modernization and its focus on preparing for military scenarios in the Taiwan Strait, Taiwan has inherent defensive advantages that China will find difficult to overcome.

Mountainous and Unforgiving Terrain

Even if China’s military successfully established a beachhead on Taiwan, it would struggle to navigate the mountainous terrain to secure the island.

Taiwan’s military, by contrast, has the advantage of knowing the land and terrain and how to defend it.

Taiwan has mountain peaks reaching over twelve thousand feet. Taiwanese troops could hide in those mountains and wage a guerrilla warfare campaign.

The Fuxing mountains of New Taipei City are seen on November 16, 2019. Sam Yeh/AFP/Getty Images

Traversing those mountains to move inland would be challenging, rendering Taiwan’s east coast far less useful and forcing invaders to focus on attacking the island’s west coast. In addition, although Taiwan has major ports located in the south, moving to the north is also hard because there are few major roadways and many river crossings. As a result, a Chinese invasion would likely have to focus squarely on the ports and beaches located near Taipei.

Strategic Chokepoints

With few viable beaches and ports to choose from and the difficulty of moving forces across the island, China’s concentration would turn to Taiwan’s capital region, home to over one-fourth of its population. China’s military would seek to seize control of Taipei and depose Taiwan’s government.

Driven by the political objective of establishing full control over Taiwan, China would need to seize control of Taiwan’s capital of Taipei.

However, gaining control of Taipei to establish full control over Taiwan would be enormously difficult. Few routes lead into the city, which sits in a bowl, ringed by mountains that defenders can utilize to target an invading force.

To prevent China’s military from seizing the capital, Taiwan can choose to destroy the city’s major port and the tunnels and highways leading into the city.

A view is shown of New Taipei City beside the Tamshui River. Sam Yeh/AFP/Getty Images

Soldiers in Yilan, Taiwan, take part in the annual Han Kuang military exercise, which simulates the People’s Liberation Army invading the island. Tyrone Siu/Reuters

Taipei 101 surrounded by mountains, which ring Taiwan’s capital. Sharleen Chao/Getty Images

Even if China’s military entered Taipei, it would have to consider conducting urban warfare.

Costly Urban Warfare

Given the island’s terrain, most of Taiwan’s twenty-three million people live in a handful of cities, with seven million residing in Taipei.

To conquer Taiwan, China would therefore be forced into urban combat, fighting street by street.

Lam Yik Fei/Getty Images

That approach would mean a slow, costly invasion.

Trainees line up to practice target shooting in New Taipei City on May 21, 2022. Ann Wang/Reuters

Trainees prepare to enter a building during a shooting lesson in New Taipei City, on May 22, 2022. Ann Wang/Reuters

Taiwan has inherent advantages that will make an invasion difficult, expensive, and uncertain. Still, the Taiwanese people’s will to fight and resist will likely prove more decisive than mountains, ports, roads, or the ocean. If China conducts the operation with little opposition, it can probably navigate and overcome those obstacles. However, if confronted with millions of people determined to repel an invasion, China will face a much tougher task.

Trainees line up to practice target shooting in New Taipei City on May 21, 2022. Ann Want/Reuters

Trainees prepare to enter a building during a shooting lesson in New Taipei City, on May 22, 2022. Ann Wang/Reuters

“Taiwan spirit, world Number 1” is seen written on the flag of Taiwan on the backpack of a trainee. Since the war in Ukraine began in February 2022, interest in civil defense has soared. Ann Wang/Reuters

Recommended Resources

CFR’s Task Force Report on U.S.-Taiwan relations provides a comprehensive overview of U.S. policy toward Taiwan as well as the history of cross-strait relations.

In this CFR Backgrounder, Lindsay Maizland explains the tensions between China and Taiwan.

In this episode of the Why It Matters podcast, CFR expert David Sacks discusses the importance of Taiwan alongside James Lin of the University of Washington.

Credits:

Graphics: Will Merrow and Michael Bricknell, Product Manager: Maria Teresa Alzuru, UI/UX Designer: Sean Eben

cfr.org · by David Sacks

11. Senator's hold is a dangerous attempt to stifle discussion

Senator's hold is a dangerous attempt to stifle discussion

defenseone.com · by Michael Embrich

Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., placed a hold on Air Force Col. Benjamin Jonsson. Schmitt had been blocking the promotions of six officers for their views on DEI policies. Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

The hold on the promotion of an Air Force colonel suggests that military officers might face professional setbacks for even acknowledging that problems exist.

January 11, 2024 06:00 AM ET

Congress

By Michael Embrich

Former member of the Advisory Committee on the Readjustment of Veterans

January 11, 2024 06:00 AM ET

Congress

The situation surrounding Air Force Col. Benjamin Jonsson and Sen. Eric Schmitt's, R-Mo., opposition to Jonsson's views on diversity, equity, and inclusion policies in the military raises crucial questions about the role of these policies in an apolitical institution like the military and the importance of addressing systemic issues such as racism.

Firstly, it's essential to acknowledge the sensitive and complex nature of discussing racism and institutional biases within any organization, especially one as integral to national security as the military. The military, by its very nature, is supposed to be a meritocratic institution where individuals are judged and advanced based on their abilities and achievements rather than their race, gender, or other immutable characteristics. However, this ideal does not exist in a vacuum and must be continually nurtured in an environment that recognizes and addresses systemic biases.

In his letter addressing white colonels in the Air Force, Col. Benjamin Jonsson confronts the deep-rooted issue of racial injustice and the role of white leadership in perpetuating systemic racism. He highlights a pattern of defensiveness and discomfort among white colonels when discussing race, evidenced by their avoidance of the topic and trivialization of serious incidents related to racial tension. Jonsson illustrates this through various instances where conversations about race were either deflected with humor or dismissed, including discussions on the disproportionate disciplining of Black Airmen and the questioning of Black officers' perspectives on racial issues. This behavior not only undermines efforts to address racial disparities but also indicates a larger problem of reluctance to acknowledge and engage with the realities of institutional racism within the military.

U.S. Air Force Col. Benjamin R. Jonsson at an Al Udeid Air Base on July 16, 2018. STAFF SGT. ENJOLI SAUNDERS/U.S. AIR FORCE

Jonsson urges his peers to recognize their responsibility in setting the culture and policies within the Air Force. He argues that without acknowledging their own biases and actively working to understand and address racial disparities, white leaders in the Air Force contribute to the persistence of these issues. He calls for a shift in mindset, advocating for engagement and action rather than passivity or denial. Jonsson emphasizes the importance of education on these matters, recommending resources like "White Fragility" by Robin DiAngelo, and underscores the need for white colonels to actively participate in creating an inclusive and just environment in the Air Force, especially in the wake of George Floyd's murder and the ensuing social upheaval.

Sen. Schmitt's response, framing DEI policies as divisive and contrary to the military's mission, reflects a common misunderstanding of the purpose and impact of such initiatives. Especially for the senator, as he has no military experience whatsoever. DEI policies are not about emphasizing differences for the sake of division; rather, they are about acknowledging and addressing inequalities to ensure that everyone, regardless of their background, has a fair chance to succeed. By dismissing these policies and their advocates, there is a risk of perpetuating the very biases and injustices these policies aim to eradicate.

The hold on Jonsson's promotion, ostensibly due to his advocacy for DEI policies, sets a concerning precedent. It suggests that military officers might face professional setbacks for acknowledging and trying to address systemic issues within the institution. This could discourage open discussion and efforts to tackle these challenges, ultimately harming the military's integrity and effectiveness.

Moreover, the fact that Jonsson's op-ed was met with avoidance and defensiveness by his peers is indicative of the discomfort and resistance often encountered when confronting deep-seated issues like racial injustice. It's imperative for leaders, especially those in a diverse and inclusive institution like the military, to engage in these difficult conversations with openness and a willingness to learn and grow.

The attempt to stifle discussion and action on DEI issues within the military, as exemplified by the block on Col. Jonsson's promotion, is a step backward in the ongoing effort to ensure fairness and justice in all sectors of society, including the military. It undermines the principles of meritocracy and equal opportunity that are foundational to the effectiveness and integrity of the armed forces. The military, as an institution, should not only be open to discussions about systemic biases but should actively engage in them to remain a truly meritocratic and just institution.

Michael Embrich is a veteran, former member of the Secretary of Veterans Affairs' Advisory Committee on the Readjustment of Veterans, and former congressional staffer.

12. Millionaire conwoman, 57, is accused of bilking US Army out of over $100 MILLION

This has to be fake news. (I do hate using that phrase). I cannot believe something like this could happen. I have not seen any other reporting on this and it is in the UK's Daily News. Correction. I just saw an article in the NY Post about this. Probably circular reporting among the tabloids.

Millionaire conwoman, 57, is accused of bilking US Army out of over $100 MILLION by stealing cash from military youth programs and splurging it on 31 homes worth up to $4M each, supercars including Aston Martins and Ferraris and luxury globetrotting trips

Janet Mello is accused of taking military funds and spending millions of dollars
The 57-year-old is accused of used it to buy luxury cars, properties and vacations
She allegedly made a shell company used to collect money from youth programs

By CLAUDIA AORAHA, SENIOR REPORTER FOR DAILYMAIL.COM

PUBLISHED: 15:28 EST, 10 January 2024 | UPDATED: 16:50 EST, 10 January 2024

Daily Mail · by Claudia Aoraha, Senior Reporter For Dailymail.Com · January 10, 2024

A millionaire conwoman has been accused of swindling the US Army out of $100million over six years by putting cash into her fake military youth business and splurging it on 31 homes and more than 70 supercars and motorcycles.

Janet Yamanaka Mello, 57, allegedly took military funds and spent millions of dollars on jewelry, clothing, luxury vehicles and real estate in one of the biggest fraud cases the military has ever dealt with.

Mello worked for the US Army at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas as a CYS Financial Program Manager.

In 2016, she allegedly created a shell company, Child Health and Youth Lifelong Development, which she fraudulently used to collect money from the 4-H military partnership grant.

The firm, which was meant to help the children of army personnel, allegedly never did. Instead, it received dozens of monetary grants - without examination - for six years.

Janet Yamanaka Mello, 57, is accused of taking military funds and spending millions of dollars on blingy jewelry, clothing, luxury vehicles, and real estate in one of the biggest fraud cases the army has ever dealt with

Mello's $3.1million property in Preston, Maryland. She regularly filed fraudulent paperwork and deposited grants a total of 40 times into her fake business during a six-year period, securing over $100,000,000 for herself, court documents allege

This is Mello's $2.3million estate in Castle Rock, Colorado

This home was listed as one of the properties to seize. It cost Mello $1.1million and is in San Antonio, Texas

Mello also owns this $870,000 home in Lakewood, Colorado. Mello had amassed a portfolio of homes in Texas, Maryland, Colorado, Washington, and New Mexico - all of which, the prosecutors claim, she bought with the frauded cash.

2023 Land Rover Range Rover (file image). Transaction details show she allegedly wire transferred $264,874 from the account to buy herself the Land Rover Range Rover last year

Now, Mello has nearly 80 vehicles and 31 properties across five states up for forfeiture - as federal prosecutors allege she lived a life of luxury and opulence that was clearly not supported by her $130,000 a year government salary.

She reported that her company CHYLD earned a profit of $483 on revenue of $2,152 for training consultations in 2017. But since then, she has not filed any tax returns.

She regularly filed fraudulent paperwork - and deposited grants into her fake business 40 times, securing over $100,000,000 for herself, documents allege.

Transaction details show she allegedly wire transferred $264,874 from the account to buy herself a 2023 Land Rover Range Rover last year.

She also sent herself $3,308,157 to purchase real estate property in Canyon Lake, Texas, documents state.

The court has listed a total of 78 luxury cars and motorbikes that Mello owns - and has demanded the assets in a bill of forfeiture. They include numerous Maseratis, Ferraris, Aston Martins, Mercedes, Teslas, Harley-Davidsons, and Land Rovers.

As well as vehicular assets, they have named 31 of her real properties. These span across multiple states - with mansions worth over $3 million, ranches, sprawling acres of farmland, and luxury high-rise apartments and condos.

Mello had amassed a portfolio of homes in Texas, Maryland, Colorado, Washington, and New Mexico - which, the prosecutors claim, she bought with the frauded cash.

Mello worked for the U.S. Army at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas as a CYS Financial Program Manager - where she was able to allegedly move money into her shell company

Mello also owns a 2003 Aston Martin Vanquish (file photo)

Among her collection that has been ordered to be seized is a 1955 Ferrari Fratelli (file photo)

A 1935 Plymouth Sedan, which Mello owned (file photo)

According to federal court documents, Mello also owned a 2018 Maserati Granturism (file photo). It was named as one of the assets they are attempting to seize

Documents also claim that Mello has six bank accounts, and she held a minimum of $32,000 in each.

It was the IRS flagged that her lifestyle - buying million-dollar homes multiple times a year - was not supported by her salary.

Their criminal investigations division worked with army investigators as they put the pieces of the puzzle together - before Mello was criminally indicted in December 2023.

On December 6, the US Attorney's Office in the Western District of Texas said that a federal grand jury in San Antonio charged Mello with 10 counts.

The statement said: 'Mello claimed that CHYLD provided services to military members and their families, when, in reality, CHYLD did not provide any services.

'The indictment alleges that Mello instead used the funds to buy millions of dollars in jewelry, clothing, vehicles, and real estate. Additionally, Mello is alleged to have falsified the digital signature of one of her supervisors on multiple occasions.'

Mello is charged with five counts of mail fraud, four counts of engaging in a monetary transaction over $10,000 using criminally derived proceeds, and one count of aggravated identity theft.

The San Antonio woman is facing up to 20 years in prison for each fraud charge, 10 years for each spending change, and a mandatory minimum of two years in prison for the aggravated identity theft charge.

Daily Mail · by Claudia Aoraha, Senior Reporter For Dailymail.Com · January 10, 2024

13. Lawmakers launch investigation into Austin’s health secrecy

Of course they will. They should wait for the chief of staff's review. It will probably be quite harsh, perhaps harsher than those who want to make political hay over this.

Lawmakers launch investigation into Austin’s health secrecy

militarytimes.com · by Leo Shane III · January 10, 2024

The House Armed Services Committee has launched an investigation into how senior Pentagon leaders mishandled Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s emergency hospitalization and non-disclosure of a cancer diagnosis amid continued concerns from lawmakers about the military’s chain of command.

The move is likely just the first in a series of formal inquiries over the coming weeks into Austin’s health and lack of communication with the White House. Austin is expected to testify before multiple committees on the annual defense budget in the coming weeks, and the issue could dominate those appearances as well.

Austin, 70, has been receiving hospital care since Jan. 1, when he was rushed to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center after developing a urinary tract infection from complications related to prostate cancer surgery on Dec. 22.

Other senior military leaders were not informed of his condition until several days later. White House officials, including President Joe Biden, were not made aware the defense secretary was hospitalized until Jan. 5, and did not learn about his cancer diagnosis until Jan. 9.

In a statement, Austin acknowledged that “I could have done a better job ensuring the public was appropriately informed.” In a press briefing on Tuesday, White House officials said the handling of the matter was “not optimal,” but said Biden has no plans for a leadership change at the Pentagon.

Austin developed infection after prostate cancer treatment

Austin is expected to make a full recovery.

In a letter to Austin on Tuesday, committee House Armed Services Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Ala., said panel members have “grave concerns” over his and other officials’ decision to not immediately inform Congress or the White House when the defense secretary was hospitalized on Jan. 1.

“With wars in Ukraine and Israel, the idea that the White House and even your own deputy did not understand the nature of your condition is patently unacceptable,” Rogers wrote. “Everything from on-going counterterrorism operations to nuclear command and control relies on a clear understanding of the secretary’s decision-making capacity.

“The Department is a robust institution, and it is designed to function under attack by our enemies, but it is not designed for a secretary who conceals being incapacitated.”

The committee inquiry will focus initially on Austin, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks, and Austin’s chief of staff, Kelly Magsamen. Pentagon officials said Magsamen learned of Austin’s hospitalization just hours after it occurred but took several days to share the news because of her own illness.

Rep. Chris Deluzio of Pennsylvania, a Democrat, called for Austin’s resignation on Wednesday.

The Senate Armed Services Committee has not taken the same formal steps as its House counterpart, but members have requested more information on the incident from Austin and Defense Department leaders.

“This lack of disclosure must never happen again,” Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Jack Reed, D-R.I., said in a statement on Monday. “I am tracking the situation closely and the Department of Defense is well aware of my interest in any and all relevant information.”

Committee ranking member Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., has requested a briefing on the confusion surrounding Austin’s medical condition, asserting in a statement Tuesday that “an internal review ordered by the same chief of staff who played a part in this crisis is woefully inadequate.” On Wednesday, Senate Republicans also requested more information from the Pentagon regarding the timeline surrounding Austin’s hospitalization.

Earlier this week, Rep. Matt Rosendale, R-Mont., announced plans to file articles of impeachment against Austin for failing to publicly disclose his health problems. House Republican leaders have not announced any plans to move ahead with that or similar articles of impeachment filed by other Republican members against Austin last August, those concerning his handling of the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan.

On Wednesday, House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., called for the resignation of Austin and “anyone who lied for him.”

National Security Council spokesman John Kirby earlier this week announced the White House and Pentagon would conduct reviews to ensure that similar communication issues do not happen again.

About Leo Shane III

Leo covers Congress, Veterans Affairs and the White House for Military Times. He has covered Washington, D.C. since 2004, focusing on military personnel and veterans policies. His work has earned numerous honors, including a 2009 Polk award, a 2010 National Headliner Award, the IAVA Leadership in Journalism award and the VFW News Media award.

14. Hamas Tunnel Found Near School, Rocket Launcher Near Kindergarten

Hamas Tunnel Found Near School, Rocket Launcher Near Kindergarten

fdd.org · by Krystal Bermudez · January 10, 2024

Latest Developments

Israeli soldiers found a rifle hidden under a child’s bed and terrorists’ weapons hidden in civilian homes in Gaza, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said on January 10. Hamas terrorists continue to use civilian homes and areas to store weapons and conduct terrorist activity, the IDF noted. A terror tunnel was discovered near a school, a rocket launcher was found near a kindergarten, and a terrorist training compound was located in the vicinity of a mosque in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis. This is the most recent discovery of Hamas’s use of civilian areas to hide its terrorist activity. In the past, Israel has exposed Hamas’s use of hospitals and other civilian areas through operations in Gaza.

Expert Analysis

“Hamas spent two decades purposely building terrorist infrastructure underneath and within civilian areas. Hamas chose to locate weapons factories and rocket launch sites within densely populated neighborhoods in order to exploit the civilian population as human shields. Dismantling the terrorist infrastructure and removing it from civilian areas is key to defeating Hamas and denying it the ability to hide behind civilians.” — Seth J. Frantzman, FDD Adjunct Fellow

“Hamas terror infrastructure is pervasive in every aspect of Gazan civilian life: UN facilities, schools, universities, mosques, and children’s bedrooms. When Hamas is defeated, the people of Gaza will have an opportunity to partner with the international community to build a society that offers accountable governance. The big question is whether they will seize that opportunity.” — Enia Krivine, Senior Director of FDD’s Israel Program and National Security Network

IDF Efforts to Minimize Harm to Civilians

IDF spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said on January 9 that the IDF was making “vast efforts to minimize harm to the civilians that Hamas has forced into the role of human shields.” He said Israel is concerned about the suffering of civilians in Gaza. Hagari also noted that Israel is ready to facilitate the transfer of as much humanitarian aid as possible, including food and medical aid.

Weapons Hidden at University

Rifles, ammunition, Hamas flags, and cash were found at Gaza’s Islamic University, the IDF said on January 9. More than 100 mortars and other munitions were also found near the university in Khan Younis, where the IDF has been fighting Hamas terrorists for the last month. IDF forces are constantly finding terrorist infrastructure located in civilian areas in Gaza. For instance, Israeli forces recently discovered a tunnel shaft near a school and photos showing students training with weapons.

Related Analysis

“Hamas Developing Precision-Guided Munitions With Iranian Help,” FDD Flash Brief

“Hamas Uses Gaza Hospital as Headquarters,” FDD Flash Brief

“Hamas Terror Tunnel Next to UNRWA School in Gaza Destroyed,” FDD Flash Brief

fdd.org · by Krystal Bermudez · January 10, 2024

15. Hamas’s Top Terrorist Leadership

Target list. Do the Israelis have a deck of cards for these?

Hamas’s Top Terrorist Leadership

fdd.org · by Daniel Ackerman · January 10, 2024

The Hamas terrorist leaders who directed the brutal October 7 attack on Israel remain top targets of the Israeli defense and intelligence communities. Understanding the background of these individuals provides a better sense of the challenge faced by the Jewish state. According to Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Galant, “Hamas terrorists have two options: Be killed or surrender unconditionally.” While the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) claim to have killed or captured thousands of terrorists, seven out of these eight top Hamas leaders remain alive.

Mohammed Deif

Hamas’s military chief in Gaza, Mohammed Deif, is considered by Israel to be one of two masterminds behind the October 7 attack. Born Mohammed Diab al-Masri in 1965, he is known as Deif, or “guest” in Arabic, because he reportedly never stays long in any one place to avoid being targeted. Deif has survived at least six attempts to kill him. His wife and at least one child were killed in an Israeli airstrike during the November 2014 Israel-Hamas war. In an October 7 audio broadcast, Deif announced Operation al-Aqsa Flood — referring to that day’s terrorism — and called on Palestinians to carry out attacks against Israelis using guns, knives, Molotov cocktails, and vehicles. He also urged Arabs inside Israel to “kill, burn, destroy, and shut down roads.” The United States added Deif to its list of Specially Designated Global Terrorists in 2015.

Ismail Haniyeh

Hamas’s external political leader since 2017, Ismail Haniyeh, is Hamas’s main intermediary with Arab and other foreign governments. However, he remains intimately involved in military affairs. Through relations with Iran over the years, Haniyeh has played a major role in building up Hamas’s military capabilities. As recently as April 2023, Haniyeh traveled to Beirut to meet Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and discuss a so-called joint security room where Hamas, Hezbollah, and other Iran-backed groups coordinate “resistance” to Israel. In November 2023, an Israeli airstrike targeted Haniyeh’s childhood house where, Israel said, senior Hamas leaders often meet to “direct terror attacks.” Haniyeh splits his time between Qatar and Turkey. In 2020, Turkey granted him citizenship, thereby allowing him to travel more freely on a Turkish passport. The United States added Haniyeh to its list of Specially Designated Global Terrorists in 2018.

Yahya Sinwar

Hamas’s political leader in Gaza since 2017, Yahya Sinwar, is considered by Israel to be the second of two masterminds behind the October 7 attack. IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi says Sinwar “decided on” the October 7 assault, and an Israeli military spokesman called him a “dead man walking.” Sinwar rose through the Hamas ranks as a fierce advocate of violence against Israel, helping establish Hamas’s military wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, and the Majd, an internal security service for the Qassam Brigades. In October 2011, Sinwar was serving multiple life terms for the killing of two Israeli soldiers when Israel released him as part of a deal to free Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, whom Hamas had held for five years. In 2015, the United States added Sinwar to its list of Specially Designated Global Terrorists.

Saleh al-Arouri — DECEASED AS OF JANUARY 2, 2024

A founding commander of the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, Saleh Al-Arouri had been Hamas’s deputy political leader since October 2017. Arouri operated from locations in Qatar and Turkey but was believed to reside in Lebanon when he was killed there. Arouri was involved in the group’s military planning and reportedly helped plan the June 2014 kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers. Six weeks before the October 7 attack, Arouri told a Lebanese news outlet, “We are preparing for an all-out war and are closely discussing [this] with all relevant parties.” Arouri coordinated Hamas activity with Lebanese Hezbollah and Iran and was known to Israeli intelligence as “Iran’s man inside Hamas.” After the October 7 attack, Arouri provided one of the first insider accounts of the massacre, including how each attacker had received “detailed instructions” regarding targeting. Arouri was one of the Hamas leaders whom Israel released in 2010 to free Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. In 2015, the United States added Arouri to its list of Specially Designated Nationals for his role as a Hamas financier.

Marwan Issa (a.k.a. Abu al-Baraa)

Marwan Issa is deputy military commander of the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades and a senior aide to Gaza military leader Mohammed Deif. Issa, who helped plan the October 7 attack, also serves as the brigades’ liaison to Hamas’s political leadership and has played a pivotal role in Hamas military preparedness and strategy. In a September 2005 statement, the Brigades identified Issa as one of its senior leaders. After Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from Gaza, Issa said Hamas “has decided to take the battle to settlers’ homes” and set his sights on “local [weapons] manufacturing to serve the resistance by land, sea, and air.” He coordinates closely with Hamas political leader Yahya Sinwar in Gaza on military operations and decision-making. In March 2023, Issa warned of an “earthquake hitting the region” and said that the “coming days will be full of events.” The United States added Issa to its list of Specially Designated Global Terrorists in 2019.

Khaled Meshal

A founding member of Hamas long identified with its most radical bloc, Khaled Meshal was named external political chief in 2004. When Hamas was founded, Meshal became the leader of the group’s Kuwait office and, subsequently, a founding member and chair of its politburo. In 1990, he moved to Jordan, where, in 1997, he was the target of an Israeli assassination attempt. In 1999, he and other senior Hamas leaders were expelled and relocated to Damascus. In January 2012, unhappy with Syrian restrictions on Hamas activity, Meshal relocated to Qatar, where Doha’s foreign minister called him “a dear guest.” In 2021, Meshal was appointed to fill a new role within Hamas, effectively its foreign minister. On October 11, 2023, Meshal urged Muslims worldwide to demonstrate in support of Palestinians and urged those in neighboring countries — Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt — to join the fight against Israel.

Mohammed Sinwar

Yahya Sinwar’s younger brother, Mohammed Sinwar, may be running Hamas operations in Gaza while Yahya is in hiding. The younger Sinwar was “100 percent” part of the team that planned the October 7 attack, according to a former Mossad counter-terror chief. The younger Sinwar joined the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades in 1991 and, during one of the Palestinian Authority’s (PA’s) crackdowns on the group due to U.S. pressure, was briefly imprisoned by the PA. Sinwar was involved in planning several suicide bombing attacks in the mid-1990s that claimed dozens of Israeli lives. In 2005, Sinwar became the commander of Hamas’s Khan Younis Brigade in southern Gaza and subsequently played a role in the kidnapping and detention of IDF soldier Gilad Shalit. Sinwar oversees Hamas’s military command structure in southern Gaza and was unsuccessfully targeted by Israel during the May 2021 Gaza war, during which he admitted to coordinating with Iran and Hezbollah.

Rafa Salama

Rafa Salama commands Hamas’s military brigade in Khan Younis, Gaza’s second largest city. In December 2023, Israel put a $200,000 bounty on his head. Israeli media have reported there are four battalion commanders under Salama, who himself reports to Mohammed Sinwar. In 2021, Israel said its planes struck Salama’s home in Gaza. In December 2008, during Operation Cast Lead, Salama’s home was also reportedly struck.

fdd.org · by Daniel Ackerman · January 10, 2024

16. This 2024 presidential election could change the world – and it’s not happening in the US

Is the election in Taiwan worthy of this hype?

This 2024 presidential election could change the world – and it’s not happening in the US | CNN

CNN · by Nectar Gan · January 11, 2024

Kuomintang (KMT) presidential candidate Hou Yu-ih shakes hands with supporters during an election campaign on January 04, 2024 in New Taipei City, Taiwan.

Annabelle Chih/Getty Images

CNN —

A presidential election in 2024 with profound implications for the wider world certainly sounds familiar. But this one is happening a lot sooner than you might think.

Taiwan, a small and vibrant Asian democracy on the doorstep of a much larger authoritarian neighbor, holds presidential and parliamentary elections on Saturday and the results will reverberate far beyond its borders.

The outcome is being closely watched by China’s Communist leaders who have long claimed Taiwan as part of their territory despite having never controlled it.

The vast majority of people in Taiwan don’t want to be ruled by China, whose strongman leader Xi Jinping has tightened his grip at home as the country becomes more aggressive towards its neighbors.

Pedestrians walk down a shopping street in Taipei, Taiwan, on Wednesday, Dec. 6, 2023.

Lam Yik Fei/Bloomberg/Getty Images

As election nears in Taiwan, many young voters say China isn’t their biggest concern

China is openly opposed to Taiwan’s current ruling party and has framed the election as a choice between “war and peace, prosperity and decline.” Xi delivered a fresh warning to Taiwan in a New Year’s Eve speech, declaring: “The reunification of the motherland is a historical inevitability.”

Taiwan also remains the biggest source of tension between China and the US, the island’s main international backer and arms supplier, and relations between the world’s two superpowers have been rocky for years.

How China responds to the choices made by Taiwan’s voters this weekend will test whether Beijing and Washington can manage tensions, or move toward further confrontation – and even conflict.

Here’s what you need to know about this crucial election:

Lai Ching-te from the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), Hou Yu-ih from the main opposition Kuomintang (KMT) and Ko Wen-je from the opposition Taiwan People's Party (TPP) pose for a picture during a debate in Taipei on December 30, 2023.

Pei Chen/AFP/Pool/Getty Images

Who are the candidates?

Three men will be vying to succeed President Tsai Ing-wen, who has held office for eight years and cannot run again due to term limits.

The frontrunner in the tight race is Lai Ching-te, the current vice president from the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which champions Taiwan’s de-facto sovereignty and separate identity from China.

A doctor-turned-politician, Lai has previously described himself as “a practical worker for Taiwan independence” – a claim that enraged Beijing and worried Washington. But he has moderated his stance on the campaign trail, pledging, like Tsai, to keep the “status quo” and offering to talk with Beijing “under principles of equality and dignity.” Beijing has rebuffed his offers, calling him a “war maker” and “destroyer of cross-strait peace.”

Lai’s running mate, Hsiao Bi-khim, is a well-known figure in Washington where she recently served as Taiwan’s envoy. China has sanctioned Hsiao twice for being a “stubborn secessionist.”

A Philippine Coast Guard personnel looks out at a China Coast Guard ship during a resupply mission for the BRP Sierra Madre, in the Second Thomas Shoal in the disputed South China Sea, on Friday, Nov. 10, 2023. Both China and the Philippines lay claims over the shoal while at least three other neighbors also claim the larger Spratly Islands chain it nestles in. Photographer: Lisa Marie David/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Lisa Marie David/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Are China’s actions in the South China Sea a harbinger of things to come for Taiwan?

Lai’s biggest challenger is Hou Yu-ih, a former police officer and popular mayor of New Taipei City from the Kuomintang (KMT), Taiwan’s main opposition party which traditionally favors closer ties with China. Hou blames the DPP for provoking China and advocates “peaceful relations” with its neighbor by keeping dialogue open and boosting economic and social ties. He also vows to strengthen Taiwan’s defense.

The third contender, Ko Wen-je, hails from the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), which he founded only in 2019. The charismatic former mayor of Taipei paints himself as a political outsider. His focus on bread-and-butter issues has been especially well received by younger voters, many of whom have grown frustrated with Taiwan’s traditional political duopoly as well as stagnant wages and unaffordable homes.

On relations with China, Ko has touted a “middle path,” accusing the DPP of being too hostile and criticizing the KMT for being too deferential.

No political party in Taiwan has ever been elected to a third term in power. If Lai wins the DPP another term, it would be unprecedented in the island’s 27-year democratic history – and a potent symbol of the failure of China’s bellicose approach to Taiwan.

Supporters of Lai Ching-te, presidential candidate of Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), cheer during an election campaign rally in Keelung on January 8, 2024.

I-Hwa Cheng/AFP/Getty Images

How has China reacted?

China has long used a mixture of carrot and stick as it seeks to persuade Taiwan to submit to its “reunification” plan. But under Xi it has become mostly stick.

Since Tsai’s first election eight years ago, Beijing has cut off most communications with Taipei, poached its dwindling number of diplomatic allies, rolled back cross-strait exchanges, and significantly ramped up military pressure.

These assertive measures have sent cross-strait relations to their lowest in decades and pushed Taiwan further away. Less than 3% of people in Taiwan now identify primarily as Chinese, and less than 10% support an immediate or eventual unification.

Taiwan has also deepened its relations with Western nations over the last eight years, including the United States, alarming Beijing.

Officials in China, a one-party state, have urged the people of Taiwan to make the “correct choice” – widely seen as a euphemism for not voting DPP.

People use mobile phones in Taipei City, Taiwan, 27 July 2020. —

People use mobile phones in Taipei City, Taiwan, 27 July 2020.

Ceng Shou Yi/NURPHO/AP

Taiwan faces a flood of disinformation from China ahead of crucial election. Here’s how it’s fighting back

Taiwan officials have accused China of attempts to interfere in its elections, including disinformation campaigns on social media and economic coercion.

Ahead of the election, China has kept military pressure on Taiwan, sending fighter jets, drones and warships close to its skies and waters. Beijing has also flown balloons over the island, in what Taiwan’s defense ministry has called part of a “psychological warfare to affect the morale of our people.”

While few experts expect an imminent invasion from the People’s Liberation Army, Beijing has ample ways to demonstrate displeasure, from a show of force through military exercises to a further suspension of trade links with Taiwan or even a blockade.

How far these actions might go – and how the US and its allies react – will be closely watched by a world already nervous about conflicts raging in Europe and the Middle East.

Supporters await the arrival of Taiwan Vice President Lai Ching-te in Universal City, California, on January 25, 2022.

Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images

What is the US relationship with Taiwan?

Washington cut formal ties with Taiwan in 1979 after switching diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing.

Since then the US has maintained close unofficial ties with Taiwan and is bound by law to provide the island with means to defend itself. But it has long remained deliberately vague on whether it will come to Taiwan’s defense in case of a Chinese attack.

Under President Joe Biden – and his predecessor Donald Trump – the US has ramped up support and arms sales to Taiwan. Biden also said on multiple occasions that the US would defend Taiwan if China invaded, sparking questions over whether the US is moving away from its long-standing policy of “strategic ambiguity.”

That has irked Beijing, which warns the Taiwan issue is “the first red line that must not be crossed in China-US relations.”

Washington maintains it does not favor any presidential candidate in Taiwan and Biden said he had explicitly warned Xi against interfering in the election during their summit in San Francisco in November.

Taiwan’s election comes as the US is trying to stabilize fraught relations with China and prevent competition from veering into conflict.

Meanwhile the US will hold its own presidential election in November, a vote that will be closely watched by Taiwan’s new leaders and the island’s 24 million people.

CNN · by Nectar Gan · January 11, 2024

17. China tells U.S. it will ‘never compromise’ on Taiwan as the island’s election draws near

How does this fit with the so-called "San Francisco vision?"

China tells U.S. it will ‘never compromise’ on Taiwan as the island’s election draws near

The status of the self-ruling democracy was among the topics discussed at U.S.-China talks in Washington as the two countries try to restore military ties.

Jan. 10, 2024, 5:40 AM EST

By Larissa Gao

NBC News · by Larissa Gao

HONG KONG — China said it would “never compromise” on its claims of sovereignty over Taiwan as the United States and China concluded two days of military talks in Washington, part of an effort to restore communication between the two countries’ militaries.

The talks were held days before Taiwan, a self-ruling island democracy, holds a presidential election that will shape its relationship with China, as well as ties between China and the U.S., Taiwan’s most important international backer.

China’s stated ambition to “reunify” with Taiwan, by force if necessary, is among the most sensitive issues between the U.S. and China, whose relationship has in recent years fallen to its lowest point in decades.

China said it would “not make any concession or compromise on the Taiwan question and demanded that the U.S. side abide by the one-China principle, honor relevant commitments, stop arming Taiwan, and not support Taiwan independence,” according to a readout published by the Chinese Defense Ministry on Wednesday.

The 17th round of the U.S.-China Defense Policy Coordination Talks was held Monday and Tuesday for the first time since 2021. They were led by Michael Chase, deputy assistant secretary of defense for China, Taiwan and Mongolia, and Maj. Gen. Song Yanchao, deputy director of China’s Central Military Commission Office for International Military Cooperation.

According to a Pentagon readout, Chase “highlighted the importance of maintaining open lines of military-to-military communication in order to prevent competition from veering into conflict.”

He also reiterated Washington’s commitment to its long-standing “One China” policy, under which the U.S. recognizes Beijing as the sole legitimate government of China but maintains unofficial relations with Taipei.

A Chinese soldier during combat exercises in the waters around Taiwan in August 2022.Xinhua News Agency / via Getty Images file

China said it was willing to develop a “healthy and stable” military relationship “on the basis of equality and respect.” It urged the U.S. to reduce its military presence and “provocation” in the South China Sea, a strategically important waterway that China claims virtually in its entirety, and to “stop supporting provocative actions” by certain countries, without identifying them.

The Pentagon said Chase “underscored the importance of respect for high seas freedom of navigation” in the face of continued Chinese “harassment” of Philippine vessels operating lawfully in the South China Sea.

President Joe Biden and Chinese Xi Jinping agreed to resume military ties at a meeting in San Francisco in November, their first meeting in a year. China had cut off military communications in 2022 after then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., visited Taiwan over its objections.

China has since increased its military activities in the Taiwan Strait, sending warplanes and naval vessels toward the island almost daily.

The talks at the Pentagon this week follow a video call last month between Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and his Chinese counterpart, Gen. Liu Zhenli, the first high-level conversation between the two militaries in more than a year.

Taiwan, which rejects Beijing’s sovereignty claims, is on heightened alert ahead of its election Saturday. Government officials have accused China of attempting to influence voters through its military and other activities in the Taiwan Strait, including a series of balloons that have been spotted around the island since last month.

On Tuesday, the Taiwanese Defense Ministry issued an air raid alert saying China had launched a satellite and urging residents to be cautious. It later apologized for mistranslating the word “satellite” as “missile” in the English-language version of the alert and said the satellite had passed over the island without incident.

China has accused Taiwan’s governing Democratic Progressive Party of “hyping up the threat from the mainland” ahead of the election to gain voter support. Similarly, Taiwan’s main opposition party, the Kuomintang, said the government issued the alert Tuesday for political gain, which the Defense Ministry denied.

The satellite, named Einstein Probe, will be used to monitor “fleeting phenomena” in space, including the merging of black holes, the Chinese Academy of Sciences said in a post on Weibo, a Chinese social media platform.

NBC News · by Larissa Gao

18., Opinion | The U.S. nudges Israel toward an off-ramp from war

Opinion | The U.S. nudges Israel toward an off-ramp from war

The Washington Post · by David Ignatius · January 10, 2024

An Arab proverb warns that you should “think of the going out before you enter.” That’s proving painfully true for Israel in the Gaza war, where it still doesn’t have a coherent exit strategy.

Israel wants a decisive defeat of Hamas to prevent it from ever again mounting a horrific terrorist attack like the one on Oct. 7. But that’s still a somewhat distant goal after three months — with Hamas dug into an underground city beneath Gaza shielded by Israeli hostages and the international community demanding a cease-fire to save Palestinian civilians.

The Biden administration is trying to help Israel mark a pathway out of the conflict by working with its key moderate Arab allies. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is completing a tour of the region in which he’s receiving pledges of support to rebuild Gaza, postwar, from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan and Egypt — on condition that Israel agree to the eventual creation of a Palestinian state.

An exit ramp is clearly marked. But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu so far refuses to make the required commitment to a Palestinian state. So the U.S.-engineered endgame is stalled. Blinken has wooed the Arabs, but he can’t seem to budge Netanyahu whose wariness reflects the views of many Israelis who are still traumatized by Oct. 7 and dread Palestinian sovereignty.

The Biden administration, meanwhile, keeps working to prevent Gaza from spiraling into a wider war — and that’s getting harder, too. President Biden & Co. talked Israel out of attacking Hezbollah in Lebanon immediately after Oct. 7. But Hezbollah rockets have turned northern Israel into a string of evacuated ghost towns, and Israeli officials say flatly that if Hezbollah doesn’t create a buffer zone along the border, Israel will mount an all-out attack to drive it back.

Can U.S.-led diplomacy avert this wider conflict? U.S. officials have been exploring every channel, with some success. Hezbollah and its patron, Iran, have signaled through intermediaries since October that they don’t want full-scale war.

But Iran and its proxies are adept at playing a double game. Hezbollah says it’s ready for talks to resolve Lebanon-Israel border disputes when the Gaza fighting stops, but it keeps firing rockets at northern Israel. And the Houthis, an Iranian-backed force in Yemen, have been shooting missiles at ships in the Red Sea — disrupting a key global maritime route. If these attacks don’t cease, officials warn, the United States will soon take military action against the Houthis, and Israel will eventually pulverize Hezbollah in Lebanon.

At the end of that dark path is a confrontation that has been brewing for 45 years between revolutionary Iran and its mortal enemies, Israel and the United States. The Iranian government probably doesn’t want that fight, but the shadowy Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps that conducts Iran’s covert operations in the region might.

How can the crisis be defused before it gets worse? Israel has taken a first step by reducing its military operations in Gaza. When Israeli troop withdrawals are finished late this month or early next, as little as one-quarter of its initial invasion force might remain in Gaza. Israel commandos would enforce a siege of the tunnels and attack Hamas fighters who tried to escape them, but the Israelis would avoid the high-intensity attacks on civilian areas that have enraged global public opinion.

Maintaining order as Israeli troops withdraw will be a nightmare. Netanyahu doesn’t want the Palestinian Authority to run postwar Gaza, so his government is considering a plan to let local Palestinian leaders administer services district by district. It’s a recipe for chaos and corruption, like the “village leagues” the Israelis sponsored in the West Bank in the 1980s. And because that would obstruct a Palestinian state, Arab nations probably won’t cooperate — leaving both Israel and Gaza in limbo.

How can the United States and its allies encourage Israelis to open the path toward a Palestinian state that so many mistrust? One sweetener would be real reform of the Palestinian Authority, with a new leader who can take over governance from an ineffective President Mahmoud Abbas and a new cabinet that’s committed to fighting corruption and improving services.

The real prize for Israel would be normalization of relations with Saudi Arabia, the Sunni world’s richest and most powerful country. Blinken got a commitment from Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman that he’s ready to openly embrace Israel — but only after the war ends and Israel accepts a pathway to a Palestinian state. MBS, as the crown prince is known, wants to be a 21st century version of Egypt’s Anwar Sadat, in an opening to Israel. But he doesn’t want to pay the price in domestic unrest, and eventual assassination, that Sadat did.

As the Biden administration struggles to contain the fallout of the Gaza war, it is encountering the same paradox that has haunted Middle East policy for a half-century: The United States is the only outside power strong enough to shape the region militarily and politically. But it can’t impose solutions, especially on a close ally like Israel.

The United States is still, despite all its setbacks, the “indispensable nation” in the Middle East. Yet it’s also a prisoner of events it can’t control — above all the abiding mistrust and violence between Israelis and Palestinians.

The Washington Post · by David Ignatius · January 10, 2024

19. US Is Weaponizing New Economic Tools to Slow China’s War Machine

Excerpts:

This won’t be the first time America has throttled the flow of capital to China; both Trump and Biden prohibited US investors from buying a range of publicly traded securities with military ties. But in its scope—potentially encompassing any Chinese company or organization, public or private, involved in semiconductors, quantum computing or artificial intelligence—EO 14105 has no precedent. It covers vast swaths of the economy and, effectively, aims to asphyxiate entire industries key to China’s capabilities on the battlefield and in cyberspace.

“The problem with designating specific entities is that it becomes a game of whack-a-mole: Every time you go after one, another pops up,” says Rick Sofield, a partner at law firm Vinson & Elkins who formerly oversaw national security reviews of acquisitions at the US Department of Justice. “Here, they’re defining whole categories based on the nature of the business. That’s not something the US has ever done before.”

While the full extent and potential impact of the boycott won’t be known until the Treasury Department publishes a draft of the rules and invites comment from interested parties, the broad outlines—and points of contention—are already clear. According to an August notice from the department, the range of covered transactions is likely to include mergers; acquisitions of minority interests; private equity, venture capital and greenfield investments; joint ventures; and convertible-debt financing. In 2022, total US foreign direct investment in China rose 9% from the year before, to $126.1 billion.

For most of the postwar era, sanctions were tools of economic coercion, a way of punishing “bad actors” such as Cuba, Iran and North Korea for harming US interests and forcing them to change behavior. By 2018, however, the thinking had changed—at least as far as China was concerned. Kurt Campbell and Ely Ratner, then former officials with expertise in Asian affairs and national defense, argued in a landmark essay in Foreign Affairs that American efforts to “shape China’s trajectory” had utterly failed and US policy needed to reflect “a more realistic set of assumptions.”

The consensus that has since emerged in both the White House and Congress is that China must be treated not as a partner willing to give and take but rather as a strategic adversary. And today, Campbell and Ratner are key architects of Biden’s blueprint for US power and influence in Asia.

US Is Weaponizing New Economic Tools to Slow China’s War Machine

A recent executive order by President Biden, unprecedented in its scope, could soon bring strict restrictions on outbound investment flows.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-10/us-deploys-tariffs-sanctions-to-slow-china-s-military-push?sref=hhjZtX76

By Erik Schatzker

January 10, 2024 at 4:00 AM EST

First came tariffs on Chinese imports, then several rounds of sanctions and an outright embargo on exports of state-of-the-art computer chips. Now, America’s multiyear campaign to deter, counter and stymie Xi Jinping’s China—an effort that started with President Donald Trump and has escalated under the current administration—is shifting to a new battleground where the stakes are even higher than in trade or technology: finance.

Last August, in Executive Order 14105, President Joe Biden directed the Department of the Treasury to draw up rules barring US investments in entities suspected of helping to develop next-generation weaponry for China’s war machine. Soon, probably in the next few months, that ban will go into effect.

This won’t be the first time America has throttled the flow of capital to China; both Trump and Biden prohibited US investors from buying a range of publicly traded securities with military ties. But in its scope—potentially encompassing any Chinese company or organization, public or private, involved in semiconductors, quantum computing or artificial intelligence—EO 14105 has no precedent. It covers vast swaths of the economy and, effectively, aims to asphyxiate entire industries key to China’s capabilities on the battlefield and in cyberspace.

“The problem with designating specific entities is that it becomes a game of whack-a-mole: Every time you go after one, another pops up,” says Rick Sofield, a partner at law firm Vinson & Elkins who formerly oversaw national security reviews of acquisitions at the US Department of Justice. “Here, they’re defining whole categories based on the nature of the business. That’s not something the US has ever done before.”

While the full extent and potential impact of the boycott won’t be known until the Treasury Department publishes a draft of the rules and invites comment from interested parties, the broad outlines—and points of contention—are already clear. According to an August notice from the department, the range of covered transactions is likely to include mergers; acquisitions of minority interests; private equity, venture capital and greenfield investments; joint ventures; and convertible-debt financing. In 2022, total US foreign direct investment in China rose 9% from the year before, to $126.1 billion.

For most of the postwar era, sanctions were tools of economic coercion, a way of punishing “bad actors” such as Cuba, Iran and North Korea for harming US interests and forcing them to change behavior. By 2018, however, the thinking had changed—at least as far as China was concerned. Kurt Campbell and Ely Ratner, then former officials with expertise in Asian affairs and national defense, argued in a landmark essay in Foreign Affairs that American efforts to “shape China’s trajectory” had utterly failed and US policy needed to reflect “a more realistic set of assumptions.”

The consensus that has since emerged in both the White House and Congress is that China must be treated not as a partner willing to give and take but rather as a strategic adversary. And today, Campbell and Ratner are key architects of Biden’s blueprint for US power and influence in Asia.

President Joe Biden meets with Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Woodside, California, on Nov. 15, 2023.Photographer: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

US officials believe the Chinese government under President Xi is exploiting every opportunity to obtain cutting-edge technology via the private sector and redirect it to military and security applications. That’s what drove the US Department of Commerce to restrict chip exports in October 2022, so China couldn’t use advanced processors such as Nvidia Corp.’s A100 and H100 to power AI engines. When Nvidia modified its chip designs to skirt the controls, the Commerce Department banned them, too.

Now the government is extending that concept to outbound investments. “This is absolutely a weaponization of economic tools toward national security ends,” says Adam Smith, who heads the international trade practice at Gibson Dunn & Crutcher and formerly specialized in sanctions on foreign governments in senior roles at the Treasury Department and the White House. “The door is open to much broader restrictions on investment flows.”

Beyond resolving the obvious moral dilemma of enabling Xi’s hostile ambitions, such as the absorption of Taiwan, there’s an official rationale for targeting capital flows to China. As Biden explained in his August executive order, US investments risk exacerbating the threat that China presents, because they confer prestige and credibility and often are accompanied by helpful counsel, market access and additional financing. He declared the situation a national emergency.

One pitfall, of course, is that China’s military-industrial complex can easily get money from non-US sources. Unlike high-end semiconductors, which are expensive, difficult to produce and supplied by only a few companies, such as Nvidia, dollars are ubiquitous and fungible.

“Do we really think the Saudis or the Emiratis or the Qataris won’t invest?” says Gary Rieschel, a longtime tech executive who founded Qiming Venture Partners in Shanghai in 2006. “Over 90% of the money going into VCs in China is renminbi. They don’t need US capital.” He thinks the US should focus instead on extending its technological lead in key industries and catching up to China in others, such as electric vehicles.

A semiconductor workshop in China’s Binhai New Area.Photographer: Costfoto/NurPhoto/AP Photo

Then there’s the problem of overcompliance. As currently envisioned, the new rules will explicitly ban transactions involving technologies and products that the government deems a “particularly acute national security threat.” A second category of transactions—those that “may contribute” to the threat to US national security—will require self-reporting. In other words, any US entity investing directly or indirectly in China’s semiconductor, quantum computing or AI industries will face deciding whether to notify the federal government.

“It’s all reliant on the private sector to interpret and implement,” says Smith, who like Sofield advises US clients on foreign investments. “No one wants a knock on the door from Treasury or the Justice Department.”

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has denied repeatedly that the Biden administration is seeking a “decoupling” from China, and in its August notice her department said the forthcoming rules are “not intended to impede all US investments into a country of concern or impose sector-wide restrictions.” To the China hawks in Congress, that doesn’t go far enough. A bill introduced by Michael McCaul, the Republican chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and Gregory Meeks, a Democrat, adds hypersonics and supercomputing to the proposed list of prohibited investments.

For many, the net effect is confusion and uncertainty. Corporate boards and management teams may determine it’s safer to “self-sanction”—i.e., not invest—than to risk noncompliance. In a sign of the descending chill, the main pension fund for US federal employees, the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board, in November moved to exclude China and Hong Kong from its portfolios, citing the possibility of yet more restrictions on Chinese investments.

“China has had limits on outbound investment for decades,” says Sofield of Vinson & Elkins. “We in the US operated with this conceit that by having free trade with China, they’d become more like us. We never thought it might make us more like them.”

Follow all new stories by Erik Schatzker

20. Army Sees Sharp Decline in White Recruits

Excerpts:

Meanwhile, the Army is seeking structural changes in how it recruits, including new recruiting career fields for soldiers aimed at putting the right talent into boots to hopefully help fill the ranks. Even with recent attempts to boost its recruiting force and slick new marketing ads, it likely faces an uphill battle to overcome culture war issues that service leaders believe are, at a minimum, exacerbating recruiting problems.

But the drop in white recruitment has baffled Army staff and isn't easily explained by any one particular factor, and no parallel demographic trends in the civilian sector are perfect comparisons.

Without proper context, some officials say, Army marketing efforts face a difficult future as the service continues to face partisan culture war attacks and the pool of eligible recruits continues to shrink.

"There are all sorts of things going on," Eberstadt said. "It's almost like a naturally made Rorschach test."

Army Sees Sharp Decline in White Recruits

military.com · by Steve Beynon · January 10, 2024

The Army's recruiting of white soldiers has dropped significantly in the last half decade, according to internal data reviewed by Military.com, a decline that accounts for much of the service's historic recruitment slump that has become the subject of increasing concern for Army leadership and Capitol Hill.

The shift in demographics for incoming recruits would be irrelevant to war planners, except it coincides with an overall shortfall of about 10,000 recruits for the Army in 2023 as the service missed its target of 65,000 new soldiers. That deficit is straining the force as it has ramped up its presence in the Pacific and Europe: A smaller Army is taking on a larger mission and training workload than during the peak of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan -- leading to soldiers being away from home now more than ever.

A total of 44,042 new Army recruits were categorized by the service as white in 2018, but that number has fallen consistently each year to a low of 25,070 in 2023, with a 6% dip from 2022 to 2023 being the most significant drop. No other demographic group has seen such a precipitous decline, though there have been ups and downs from year to year.

In 2018, 56.4% of new recruits were categorized as white. In 2023, that number had fallen to 44%. During that same five-year period, Black recruits have gone from 20% to 24% of the pool, and Hispanic recruits have risen from 17% to 24%, with both groups seeing largely flat recruiting totals but increasing as a percentage of incoming soldiers as white recruiting has fallen.

The rate at which white recruitment has fallen far outpaces nationwide demographic shifts, data experts and Army officials interviewed by Military.com noted. They don't see a single cause to the recruiting problem, but pointed to a confluence of issues for Army recruiting, including partisan scrutiny of the service, a growing obesity epidemic and an underfunded public education system.

Internally, some Army planners are alarmed over the data trends, but see it as a minefield to navigate given increasing partisan attacks against the military for its efforts to recruit and support a diverse force, according to interviews with several service officials.

The Army declined Military.com's request to share its regional recruiting data, which could show what specific parts of the country are struggling. Military.com had seen internal Army numbers that suggested that the shift in demographics was even more dramatic, but when presented with those figures, Army public affairs officials insisted that they were wrong and provided updated statistics included in this article, while blaming a system coding error.

The updated data provided by the Army did not break down recruit demographics by both race and gender at the same time, meaning that it's unclear whether the sharp decline is worse among white women or white men, or if the drop was the same for both groups.

Collapse of Men in the Labor Market

Though the recruiting numbers reviewed by Military.com point to a stable gender divide for incoming soldiers, 83% male in 2018 versus 82% in 2023, the disproportionate number of men donning the uniform means that a disruption to men seeking work in the U.S. can have a major impact on the military services. That exact dynamic is at play, according to civilian experts, as men have been disappearing from labor market statistics.

"Men have been in trouble in the workforce for two generations. The greatest risk of being a labor dropout is being a native-born, low education, unmarried guy," said Nicholas Eberstadt, an economist who studies demographics at the American Enterprise Institute. "Like with any other big historic change, it's kind of hard to attribute to a single magic bullet."

According to Army officials, recruiting efforts are starting to broadly mimic the trends in the private sector, though it's unclear why that would particularly impact white recruiting.

"What we're seeing is a reflection of society; what we know less of is what is driving all of these things," one Army official told Military.com. "There is no widely accepted cause."

Part of those labor trends is men in their prime working age of 25 to 54 years old detaching from the labor market for decades, though that age group is slightly older than prime recruiting age.

The work rate for men in that age group has dropped from 94% in 1948 to 86% in 2023, according to Eberstadt's landmark study "Men Without Work." That group accounts for roughly six million men who are unemployed and not looking for work, which generally isn't captured by unemployment stats. It's a bit of a mystery to data experts, with no single explanation like drug addiction or women's increased participation in the workforce explaining the sharp drop.

Among other problems, opioid overdoses have increasingly pummeled the U.S. every year, with 80,000 deaths in 2021 and about 75% of overdose victims being white and many in their twenties, according to data compiled by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

And some Army officials interviewed by Military.com pointed to struggles by recruits from the South to meet service standards, though there are no indications that recruits from the South are disproportionately white. A 2018 study published in the Journal of Public Health Management and Practice found Southern recruits are 22% more likely to get injured in basic training and had the lowest median levels of fitness compared to troops from other parts of the country.

Nationally, the South has the highest prevalence of obesity, something researchers have attributed to a slew of factors, including restrictions on access to health care, high-quality fitness facilities and healthy food. Large swaths of the South also have relatively low household incomes -- putting easy access to fitness training and healthy foods even further out of reach.

Partisan Attacks

Another Army official pointed to partisan attacks from conservative lawmakers and media, which has an overwhelmingly white audience. Those groups have used the military as a partisan cudgel against the Biden administration, lambasting the services for being "woke," or so preoccupied with liberal values that they have abandoned their warfighting priorities. In most cases, those attacks have zeroed in on the services being more inclusive for women, service members from racial minority groups and LGBTQ+ troops.

"No, the young applicants don't care about this stuff. But the older people in their life do who have a lot of influence ... parents, coaches, pastors," one Army official told Military.com. "There's a level of prestige in parts of conservative America with service that has degraded. Now, you can say you don't want to join, for whatever reason, or bad-mouth the service without any cultural guilt associated for the first time in those areas."

The Army has made a few passing attempts to court those cultural influencers in hopes they might be more willing to recommend service to young Americans. This includes a high-profile oath of enlistment ceremony on "Fox and Friends," an oped in The Wall Street Journal from service secretaries pitching service, and a return to a nostalgic recruiting slogan while heavily investing in advertising on cable television.

Often, those "woke" critiques include few specifics. Right-wing pundits and lawmakers have routinely blasted the Army for a 2022 recruiting ad, titled "The Calling," featuring a real-life soldier who has two mothers and participated in Pride events. The Army, in producing ads like that one, has seen data showing that LGBTQ+ rights are considered a major priority among Gen Z, the demographic that the service needs to court to build its ranks.

The service has since distanced itself from that ad.

"I don't know the genesis of it. Or why they. ... 'The Calling' was before me," Agnes Schaefer, assistant secretary of the Army for manpower and reserve affairs, told lawmakers in December, referencing the ad when pressed on the reasoning for it.

Parallels with Civilian College Enrollments

A similar demographic trend to what the Army is experiencing has been popping up at colleges across the country. Between 2010 and 2021, white undergraduate and graduate college enrollment rates fell from 43% to 38%, according to the most recent federal data from the National Center for Education Statistics. That dip coincided with fewer men enrolling, with male enrollment decreasing from 38% to 33% over the same period of time.

Higher education has also faced fierce partisan attacks from right-wing lawmakers and partisan media, with critiques of the U.S. higher education system being potent ways to gin up the Republican base.

Men now account for about 40% of undergraduate students, after seeing a steady decline since the 1970s. That decline has run broadly parallel to a decline in job opportunities for low-skill labor and manufacturing, meaning that as men are becoming less educated as a demographic, the pool of jobs they qualify for becomes increasingly shallow.

One of the key pitches for military service is numerous scholarships available to service members during or after service, most notably the GI Bill -- broadly seen on Capitol Hill as among the most successful federal programs. But if college is becoming less relevant to white males, that pitch for service could become less enticing moving forward.

Meanwhile, the Army is seeking structural changes in how it recruits, including new recruiting career fields for soldiers aimed at putting the right talent into boots to hopefully help fill the ranks. Even with recent attempts to boost its recruiting force and slick new marketing ads, it likely faces an uphill battle to overcome culture war issues that service leaders believe are, at a minimum, exacerbating recruiting problems.

But the drop in white recruitment has baffled Army staff and isn't easily explained by any one particular factor, and no parallel demographic trends in the civilian sector are perfect comparisons.

Without proper context, some officials say, Army marketing efforts face a difficult future as the service continues to face partisan culture war attacks and the pool of eligible recruits continues to shrink.

"There are all sorts of things going on," Eberstadt said. "It's almost like a naturally made Rorschach test."

military.com · by Steve Beynon · January 10, 2024

21. Top Marine could return to work in a matter of weeks, Del Toro says

Top Marine could return to work in a matter of weeks, Del Toro says

marinecorpstimes.com · by Megan Eckstein · January 11, 2024

Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Eric Smith may be back on the job “in the next several weeks,” Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro told reporters Tuesday, adding he wants Smith to take his time healing and not hurry back to work.

“He’s out of the ICU now, he’s in a lower-level treatment room,” Del Toro told reporters after speaking at the Surface Navy Association’s annual conference in Arlington, Virginia.

“He’s walking around. He’s in good spirits. He’s strong. He’s itching to get back,” Del Toro said. “I foresee that they’ll be some additional therapy that will be involved over the next two to three weeks to make sure that he recovers completely.”

Following a cardiac arrest on Oct. 29 and subsequent hospitalization, Smith had been recovering at home. He returned to the hospital for a Jan. 8 surgery to repair a bicuspid aortic valve in his heart.

Del Toro praised the broader Marine Corps leadership team for ensuring the service is well tended to during this time.

The secretary said Gen. Christopher Mahoney, the assistant commandant who has also been serving as acting commandant, “is doing a great job as the acting commandant, and so I’ve expressed my personal opinion to Gen. Smith that he needs to recover and he shouldn’t be, quote, in a rush to just get back. He’s in constant conversation with Gen. Mahoney; he’s not totally out of touch or anything.”

Bottom line, Del Toro said: “His health is really much better now than it was before.”

About Megan Eckstein

Megan Eckstein is the naval warfare reporter at Defense News. She has covered military news since 2009, with a focus on U.S. Navy and Marine Corps operations, acquisition programs and budgets. She has reported from four geographic fleets and is happiest when she’s filing stories from a ship. Megan is a University of Maryland alumna.

22. Meet the skateboarding Green Beret shredding the civilian-military gap

An eclectic bunch, those Green Berets.

Meet the skateboarding Green Beret shredding the civilian-military gap

From skating the streets of Philly as a kid to Green Beret deployments around the world.

BY JOSHUA SKOVLUND | PUBLISHED JAN 10, 2024 6:46 PM EST

taskandpurpose.com · by Joshua Skovlund · January 10, 2024

Staff Sgt. Adam Klakowicz’s heart was pounding with adrenaline as he stepped off the ramp of a Chinook helicopter a few miles outside of Kabul, Afghanistan. It was August 2008, and he was conducting his first combat mission. He and his fellow Green Berets and Afghan Commandos secured the immediate area before pushing into their target compound.

That was the moment Kalkowicz knew he was living the dream as a Green Beret.

“My first mission into combat, the second I got off that helicopter. I thought, ‘I’m doing it. This is it. I’m in combat, leading a partner force.’ When people say, ‘Oh, I didn’t know what I was getting into,’ but not me,” Klakowicz said. “When I stepped off that helicopter, I was exactly where I was supposed to be. I’m doing exactly what I knew I was getting into.”

Sgt. 1st Class Adam Klakowicz enjoying terminal leave before officially retiring. Photo by Brian Godinez.

Flash forward to 2023, now a Sgt. 1st Class, Klakowicz is in the process of retiring from the U.S. Army. He’s served a full career as a Special Forces soldier, including time at a USASOC special mission unit, and always with a skateboard nearby.

With a strong Irish family history of boxing, he had dreams of turning pro as a boxer. Klakowicz joined the Army to make it onto the All Army Boxing Team, now called the U.S. Army World Class Athlete Program boxing team, to get a second run at the Olympic Boxing trials. After joining the army, he was stationed in Germany, where he had the unique experience of learning how European boxing works.

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During his time in Germany, he won the 2004 U.S. Forces Europe boxing championship, giving him an automatic bid to try out for the All-Army boxing team, a necessary step for a shot at making the Olympic team. Klakowicz had worked hard to achieve this dream, maxing his PT test scores and spending a lot of time in the gym. The only hang-up: his commander had to sign off on the orders because Klakowicz was one of his best soldiers.

“It’s kind of what dug me out because I was in a slump,” Klakowicz said. “My commander wouldn’t let me go try out. Dude, that was a heartbreaker. It’s one of the not-coolest things to ever happen to me.”

His dreams were smashed. He blew steam off like any young soldier does: drinking. That only lasted about a week because Klakowicz picked his skateboard back up and started skating around Germany.

Though Klakowicz’s passion chance at a professional fighter career was gone, his love of skateboarding kept him motivated. He kept skating and boxing and moved on with the daily Army grind. But, before Christmas leave, a Special Forces recruiter stopped by his unit and wanted to talk to soldiers with 300 PT test scores and expert rifleman badges. Klakowicz was one of three in the company.

Not long after talking with the recruiter, he attended Special Forces Assessment and Selection in 2005. Klakowicz was selected, went through the Special Forces Qualification Course, and then arrived at his new home at the 7th Special Forces Group. He thought he would be doing jungle stuff, but his first deployment was to Afghanistan in 2008. That’s where he got his first taste of what the Green Beret life is all about.

“Our sole mission in life is unconventional warfare. We train, equip, and lead indigenous personnel in combat against a common enemy to influence U.S. interests. That is what we do. That is our sole purpose in life.”

He led a platoon of Afghan Commandos to search for an IED factory during that 2008 deployment as part of a Joint Special Operations Task Force. He’s conducted hundreds of missions since then, becoming one of the few at the tip of the spear. It was a stressful life, and while some guys would resort to drinking, Klakowicz was out skateboarding. It’s always been his way of coping.

Klakowicz grew up skating the streets of Philadelphia in the 90’s. He was more of a street skater, and Philly was a melting pot of skateboarding. Klakowicz skated with several pros as he continued to hone his skateboarding skills growing up.

Though he didn’t realize it then, his skateboarding pursuit was helping him develop skills that would help him later in life as a Green Beret. Reconnaissance is one of those skills. Special Forces utilize it for their missions, while street skaters use it to find their next spot.

Skate spots can be anything from a traffic cone marking a cracked portion of the sidewalk to a three-story staircase with a rail. Skateboarders find ‘creative’ ways to access some spots, often facing hostile security guards or police officers chasing them off. Though not all skills transfer directly to a Green Beret’s work, there are many parallels.

In most special operations assessment and selection courses, candidates undergo physically rigorous tasks most normal people would describe as a punishment — soldiers who can’t handle that are dropped or fail to meet the standard. Similarly, not many who start skateboarding will stick with it because of the pure dedication needed to improve despite falling off a board countless times.

Klakowicz describes a Green Beret spending time on the range to improve their shooting skills with a skateboarder trying to perfect a kickflip. You’ll fail, but with attention to detail, you can learn that new trick just like you can master clearing a room.

Klakowicz found a way to get some skateboarding in, no matter where he deployed. He’s skated a mini-ramp built at a combat outpost in Afghanistan and street spots in Australia between training. One of his all-time funny skateboarding moments happened during a deployment to Botswana in 2017. Klakowicz was skating in a park when he noticed people running away.

“It was a funny experience. You kickflip a bench and then look up, and there’s a baboon in the woods staring at you,” Klakowicz said. “I don’t really know what he’s gonna do because he’s a wild baboon in Botswana, and there’s a dude riding a skateboard. He’s probably just as confused as I was.”

As Klakowicz skateboarded more, he connected with more and more of his fellow soldiers as the Army’s view of skateboarding went from tolerating it to embracing it. Most in the public wouldn’t expect the military and skateboarding worlds to intertwine: one is government work and stresses discipline, while the other is generally associated with anarchy.

But because of how like-minded people can be from both worlds, you won’t find veterans or active-duty soldiers picking fights with civilian skaters often, if at all. You will see them cheering each other on when they land a new trick or skate a difficult obstacle like jumping a 10-foot gap.

When Klakowicz arrived at Ft. Liberty (previously Ft. Bragg), he immediately plugged into the skate scene. Nobody at the skatepark knew what he did in the Army, nor did they ask about it. Whenever Klakowicz and some of his new friends were skateboarding, that’s what they focused on.

Sgt. 1st Class Adam Klakowicz demonstrating that strong knife hand to a fellow skateboarder Michael Artis. Photo by Brian Godinez.

These days, Klakowicz is a part of Raid Skateboards’ skateboarding team called “Raid Team 1.” It’s a close balance of civilian, veteran, and active-duty skateboarders. Though many of his newfound friends weren’t in the military or veterans, they clicked right away. Klakowicz said it’s because of how many similarities special operations soldiers have with skateboarders, starting with their attitude.

“It’s that never-quit attitude. Anybody who’s skated for a couple of years has, at a point in time, practiced certain tricks for hours,” Klakowicz said. “Let’s say you get to a level where you’re throwing yourself downstairs. Now, you’re taking punishment.”

The unique aspect of how civilians and active duty soldiers get together is how they teach each other — a trait of every Green Beret. When someone needs help learning a new trick, the more experienced skaters will help them learn. When a skater wants to learn more about joining the military, Klakowicz or some other guys on Raid Team 1 will help them as a mentor.

Sgt. 1st Class Adam Klakowicz skating Fort Liberty before his official retirement from the U.S. Army. (Photos by Brian Godinez. Task & Purpose Composite image)

But only when they ask, and they never ask when they are out skateboarding at street spots or the parks. No one steps out of their lane to try and give advice when it’s not asked for because of the mutual respect they all have for each other, military service or not.

As Klakowicz continues his transition back into the civilian world after a lengthy career as a Green Beret, he has some advice for anyone worried they won’t be able to skateboard after they join.

“I could jump out of a plane, land, pack up my parachute, throw it on a truck, and then go to a flat range and be a badass Green Beret,” Klakowivcz said. “Then I can go home, hug my wife, grab my son, and go down to the skatepark and skate with those guys. If my wife and son are gone. I’m down at Festival Park, drinking a 40 with a homeless dude and skating with Josh, LT, and Snail.”

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taskandpurpose.com · by Joshua Skovlund · January 10, 2024

23. No, Taylor Swift is not a Pentagon PsyOp

Sigh...So typical of Fox news BS.

But I have to commend Ms Singh's swift response here.

Excerpts:

The Army referred Task & Purpose to the Pentagon.

“As for this conspiracy theory, we are going to shake it off,” said Sabrina Singh. “But that does highlight that we still need Congress to approve our supplemental budget request as Swift-ly as possible so we can be out of the woods with potential fiscal concerns.”

Though there is no evidence Swift is a state actor, her success in 2023 has been compared to actual states. The economic impact of her “Eras Tour” topped the GDP of about $5 billion was larger than close to 50 countries, including Fiji, Aruba and Djbouti. During her concert in Seattle, fans caused a 2.3 magnitude earthquake. Her concerts across the country even revived the post-pandemic economies of several U.S. cities.

If we are to talk about Swift and psychological operations, the billion-dollar pop star’s use of psyops on her fanbase might be worth investigating for national security inspiration. Known as “easter eggs” to Swifties and fans alike, she is known to drop clues or hints about her music through the content she posts, the cryptic things she says, or the clothing she wears.

No, Taylor Swift is not a Pentagon PsyOp

Responding to the claim, the Pentagon said it was going to "shake it off."

BY PATTY NIEBERG | PUBLISHED JAN 10, 2024 6:43 PM EST

taskandpurpose.com · by Patty Nieberg · January 10, 2024

No, Taylor Swift is not a Pentagon PsyOp. But she is a mastermind.

“No one wanted to play with me as a little kid, so I’ve been scheming like a criminal ever since, to make them love me and make it seem effortless,” she sings in her song “Mastermind.”

And now, for the millionth time in her career, Swift has to defend her success because of a man.

“I’m so sick of running as fast as I can, wondering if I’d get there faster if I were a man,” Swift sings in her song “The Man.”

Earlier this week, Fox News host Jesse Watters played a video that he said showed a Department of Defense official suggesting Taylor Swift could be part of a federal psychological operation.

“She’s all right, but I mean, have you ever wondered why or how she blew up like this?” Watters said Tuesday during his primetime Fox News television slot. “Well, around four years ago, the Pentagon psychological operations unit floated turning Taylor Swift into an asset during a NATO meeting. What kind of asset? A PsyOp for combatting online misinformation.”

In the words of Swift herself: “We see you over there on the internet, comparing all the girls who are killing it. But we figured you out, we all know now, we all got crowns. You need to calm down.”

His statement was not completely accurate.

This is why we can’t have nice things.

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The clip that Waters referred to was from a 2019 conference in Estonia which was organized by a multinational and interdisciplinary NATO cyber defense group. The speaker, Alicia Marie Bargar, a research engineer at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, mentioned the singer as an example of the power of influence online.

“You came in here wanting to understand how you just go out there and counter in that information operation,” she tells the audience. “But the idea is that social influence can help encourage or promote behavior change.”

Bargar went on to describe her power as a “fairly influential online person” as useful for “a peaceful information operation.”

Waters thinks she did it. But he just can’t prove it.

“I have no connection to the Pentagon,” Bargar told Task & Purpose. “Taylor Swift was an incidental example of a famous person to explain a social network analysis concept to the audience.”

The Army referred Task & Purpose to the Pentagon.

“As for this conspiracy theory, we are going to shake it off,” said Sabrina Singh. “But that does highlight that we still need Congress to approve our supplemental budget request as Swift-ly as possible so we can be out of the woods with potential fiscal concerns.”

Though there is no evidence Swift is a state actor, her success in 2023 has been compared to actual states. The economic impact of her “Eras Tour” topped the GDP of about $5 billion was larger than close to 50 countries, including Fiji, Aruba and Djbouti. During her concert in Seattle, fans caused a 2.3 magnitude earthquake. Her concerts across the country even revived the post-pandemic economies of several U.S. cities.

If we are to talk about Swift and psychological operations, the billion-dollar pop star’s use of psyops on her fanbase might be worth investigating for national security inspiration. Known as “easter eggs” to Swifties and fans alike, she is known to drop clues or hints about her music through the content she posts, the cryptic things she says, or the clothing she wears.

Watters also notes the use of musicians in the past to drive political agendas like Elvis Presley’s outreach to President Richard Nixon to help with the war on drugs and President Ronald Reagan’s deployment of Michael Jackson as a campaign spokesperson against teen drinking and driving.

“Is Swift a front for a covert political agenda?” Waters said, adding that her relationship with NFL star Travis Kelce has brought in “a whole new demographic” to the sport.

He also noted Swift’s influence on voting registration, which saw 35,000 new voters after posting the Vote.org link to her Instagram story.

During the 2018 congressional election in Tennessee, Swift broke her political silence when she endorsed Democratic Senate candidate, Phil Bredesen, who ran against Republican incumbent Sen. Marsha Blackburn. Swift was also credited with increased voter registration in the state.

It is generally illegal to perform psychological operations domestically that involve U.S. citizens. However, one of the greatest examples of illegal government operations was the CIA’s MK Ultra study which performed nonconsensual experiments on U.S. citizens. Researchers wanted to identify drugs that could be used to force confessions from Soviet bloc enemies during the Cold War through brainwashing and psychological torture.

Beyond the speculation and claims, Swift does have actual military connections. Her grandfathers served in the military during World War II in the Marine Corps, Navy and Coast Guard. A former security guard of Swift’s recently went back to Israel to join the IDF’s reserves as war broke out between Israel and Hamas.

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taskandpurpose.com · by Patty Nieberg · January 10, 2024

24. How Lloyd Austin’s Deputy Ended Up Running the Pentagon From the Beach

How Lloyd Austin’s Deputy Ended Up Running the Pentagon From the Beach

Miscommunication and culture of secrecy contributed to keeping even the president in the dark for several days

https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/lloyd-austin-pentagon-deputy-beach-243bdf91?mod=hp_lead_pos7

By Gordon LuboldFollow

and Nancy A. YoussefFollow

Jan. 10, 2024 5:53 pm ET

WASHINGTON—For four days in January, most of Washington, including President Biden, didn’t know who was running the Pentagon.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was secretly rushed to Walter Reed Military Medical Center on New Year’s Day, suffering from nausea and severe pain. It would be eight days before the president learned why.

So began a series of events without modern precedent. Austin—sixth in the line of presidential succession and second in the line of military command after the president—was hospitalized and his deputy required to step in from a beach in Puerto Rico where she was on vacation, days before President Biden was informed.

Only a small cadre of aides was aware that Austin was hospitalized. Most others in the Pentagon, including Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks, who was carrying out his duties, were kept in the dark, according to the Pentagon’s current version of events. Sasha Baker, the Defense Department’s top policy official and the most senior official present at the Pentagon during that time, attended a meeting at the White House on Jan. 3, unaware that Austin was hospitalized.

The improbable episode involving one of Biden’s most loyal and low-profile cabinet members reflects the culture of secrecy that has been a hallmark of Austin’s tenure since he arrived at the Pentagon in January 2021. It also raises questions about how that secrecy may have inadvertently subverted the careful plans government agencies make for ensuring continuity of operations when a leader is incapacitated or unavailable to make decisions.

While Austin was in the hospital—and White House and senior officials at the Pentagon were unaware who was in charge—the U.S. carried out a deadly drone strike against an Iranian-backed militia leader in Baghdad, and issued an ultimatum to Yemen’s Houthi rebel group to cease its attacks on international shipping in the Red Sea or face the consequences.

When news of Austin’s hospitalization eventually got out, the public backlash was swift. Lawmakers, including some Democrats, expressed outrage at the unprecedented lack of information. White House and Pentagon officials privately fumed at the absurdity of the lack of transparency surrounding Austin’s condition.

Fifty-Five Hours of Risk: The Dangerous Implications of Slow Attack Attribution - Modern War Institute

mwi.westpoint.edu · by JD Maddox · January 10, 2024

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It took fifty-five hours and twenty-five minutes for a news organization to publish an authoritative public attribution of the Islamic State’s dual suicide bombings in Kerman, Iran, which killed at least ninety people on January 3. During that time, at least one Iranian high official openly blamed Israel for the attacks and called for reprisal attacks, and in the immediate aftermath some American reporters simply repeated Iranian accusations, offering little further investigation into the originators. In the meantime, the Islamic State’s claim to the attacks was questioned and debated broadly.

These rhetorical reactions to the bombings in Kerman are understandable. Amid shifting political and military relationships, it may be increasingly difficult to quickly and reliably identify the perpetrators of an attack. With the greater prominence of proxy organizations used to do the biddings of vengeful states, reliably identifying an attacker’s identity also may be harder. And public officials, news organizations, and commentators can be quick to apply existing paradigms to their attack analysis (intelligence analysts call this “anchoring”). Although the Sunni Islamic State has previously attacked its Shiite Iranian nemesis using similar tactics, Tehran’s close focus on the current Israel-Hamas fight might have anchored it to its inaccurate attribution.

But understandable or not, a delay in accurate attack attribution can give attack originators, or other spoilers, valuable time to redirect blame and to instigate tragic reprisals. Fifty-five hours is an extraordinary window of time for these kinds of malign influence operations. The Russians, for example, are well known for their historical misattribution efforts—creating timely false pretext for acts of violence ranging from the 1939 Winter War to the current war in Ukraine. Their recent influence operations in the United States offer a fairly clear picture of their effective synchronization of offline and online operations, meant to propel Americans’ online sympathies into physical action. Their instigation of physical protests around the 2016 US presidential election is by now legendary.

In the context of current Middle East tensions, it’s easy to imagine the outcome of an open Israeli attack on Iranian civilians. Civilian deaths would almost certainly provoke a reprisal attack, perhaps escalating Iran’s current proxy war and enabling hawkish new Iranian relationships against Israel and other shared enemies. The United States would not be immune to new violence, and instead would likely be drawn into a more complex security dilemma—a choice between commitment to a long-term ally and commitment to open regional warfare. Disproving false claims of such an attack—quickly—is essential to avoiding misdirected violent escalation.

While the United States was not the target of the Islamic State’s physical attacks in Kerman, it was a target of intentional information releases, and the United States’ narrative vulnerability was on full display. Immediately after the attacks, a notorious US-based social media account claiming expertise in open-source intelligence alleged that the supreme leader of Iran ordered the Iranian military to stand down, and the posting attracted nearly seven hundred thousand views by the end of the first day, with thousands of likes and reposts—demonstrating the uncritical acceptance of unchecked information. Meanwhile, anti-Israel accounts on social media were quick to conflate Israel’s actions against Hamas with Israel’s purported attacks in Kerman, and the posts remained online even after Islamic State attribution. Furthermore, op-eds by activist anti-Israel publications like Tasnim News and the Tehran Times appeared after the attack, blaming Israel and the United States for the bombings. Posts like these are the kernels of misinformation from which deliberate disinformation campaigns can be grown.

The informational risk accompanying a physical attack may be more problematic now than ever for the United States. The US government’s recent experimentation with counter-disinformation capabilities, such as the abortive Disinformation Governance Board and the increasingly imperiled Global Engagement Center, show that an influential faction of American politics strongly rejects these kinds of efforts. Without an effective capability to reduce the impact of malign influence, the United States often relies on its intelligence community as a source of information assurance during threats of violence and other high-risk contingencies. But the intelligence community, too, is increasingly distrusted by the American public.

Assuming that its foreign adversaries’ recent violent threats are to be taken seriously, and that the likelihood of a direct attack against the United States is, if not on the rise, at least significant enough to warrant serious attention, the United States has an urgent mandate to prepare effective cognitive defenses. Foremost among these is the ability to quickly and accurately attribute attacks to their originators, and to deliver that information to the public through a trustworthy vehicle. A fifty-five-hour delay invites disaster.

J.D. Maddox is a former intelligence advisor to the secretary of homeland security. He has also led influence activities as a Central Intelligence Agency branch chief, a deputy coordinator of the US Global Engagement Center, and a US Army psychological operations team leader. He frequently speaks and writes on topics of national security and captured his views of influence operations in the New York Times article, “The Day I Realized I Would Never Find Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq.”

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

Image credit: Mehr News Agency (Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International)

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mwi.westpoint.edu · by JD Maddox · January 10, 2024

26. Victory Is Ukraine’s Only True Path to Peace

Excerpts:

If at the end of the war, Ukraine is left in the gray zone between Russia and NATO, it will be a recipe for further instability and Russian aggression. This is a reality that both Finland and Sweden quickly recognized. After the February 2022 invasion, both countries saw that in the face of an imperialist Russia, neutrality was no longer an option and that only NATO membership could guarantee their sovereignty. The same goes for Ukraine.

At NATO’s July 2023 summit, members announced that an invitation for Ukraine to join the alliance would be issued only once unspecified “conditions are met.” Ukraine had hoped for something more concrete than that. If Putin believes that Ukraine will only be allowed to join NATO when the fighting ends, it gives him an incentive to continue the war indefinitely. If Ukraine is invited to join the alliance beforehand, however, it could force him to stop.

Although the summit in Vilnius did not present Ukraine with a clear path toward NATO membership, there were positive developments. Members agreed to let Kyiv skip the “membership action plan” part of the traditional accession process, whereby countries submit annual reports about their progress on various security-related metrics. This exemption, which was also granted to Finland and Sweden, should accelerate Ukraine’s eventual accession. In Vilnius, the newly created Ukraine-NATO Council also held its first meeting, and it is already working on bringing Ukraine’s armed forces into alignment with NATO standards.

Still, at this year’s NATO summit in Washington, D.C., in July, the alliance’s leaders would bring the world closer to peace by wholeheartedly embracing Ukrainian membership. The time has come to issue an invitation for Ukraine to join NATO. That does not mean that Ukraine would become a member overnight, but it would send an unequivocal message to Putin that his war is already lost.

Victory Is Ukraine’s Only True Path to Peace

And EU and NATO Membership Are the Only Way to Achieve Enduring Security

By Anders Fogh Rasmussen and Andriy Yermak

January 11, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by Anders Fogh Rasmussen and Andriy Yermak · January 11, 2024

For Ukraine, December 14 was a tale of two cities. In Brussels, the European Union’s leaders took the historic decision to open talks with Ukraine about joining the organization. For millions of Ukrainians, it was a moment of hope for a brighter future after enduring years of war and hardship. The message was clear: Ukraine belongs at the heart of Europe.

This vision of Ukraine’s future could not have been more different than the one being described by Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on the same day. Responding to pre-screened questions from journalists and handpicked citizens, Putin insisted during a televised press conference that Russia’s political and military aims had not changed since the beginning of the war. Russia has no interest in peace, he made clear, only the subjugation of Ukraine. Putin’s stage-managed affair broadcast the reality of modern-day Russia: a regime built not on democratic legitimacy but on lies and militaristic nationalism, and a government that relies on external conflict to deflect attention from internal failings.

As Putin pushes for a long war, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is working for a sustainable peace. Because the consequences of Russia’s invasion have been global—from spiking energy costs to food shortages—Ukrainian officials have been working with counterparts from more than 80 countries to deliver on Ukraine’s “peace formula,” a 10-point plan first proposed by Zelensky in November 2022. On January 14, national security advisers for the leaders of these countries will gather for the fourth time in Davos, Switzerland, to continue elaborating a framework for a lasting and comprehensive peace. We believe that all civilized countries of the world shall support this endeavor.

As long as Putin is in charge, Russia will always threaten not just Ukraine but also the security of all of Europe. It is therefore vital for the democratic world to ensure that a free and independent Ukraine prevails. To do so, it should put in place the security architecture needed to deter a militaristic and imperialistic Russia. If Putin sees the West making strong commitments to Ukraine—through military assistance, accession to the EU, and membership in NATO—he will finally understand that he cannot outlast Kyiv. Only then is there a possibility of a sustainable peace.

STEP ONE: WIN THE WAR

To achieve a lasting peace, Ukraine needs to defeat Russia on the battlefield and restore its territorial integrity, within its internationally recognized borders. For two years, Ukrainian armed forces have heroically resisted Russia’s barbaric invasion. Making good use of Western-supplied weapons, they have managed to reclaim more than 50 percent of the land captured by Russia since February 2022. Meanwhile, the supply of modern air defense systems has dented the effectiveness of Russia’s brutal waves of drone and missile attacks on Ukrainian cities. Ukraine will be forever grateful for the support the democratic world has shown during the country’s darkest hours.

Despite these successes, Russia will not end its war of aggression anytime soon. Its generals will continue to show complete disregard for the lives of their own forces, sending tens of thousands to die in a war of Putin’s choice. Russian and North Korean missiles and Iranian-made drones will continue to target Ukrainian civilians and critical infrastructure.

If military support for Ukraine falters, the consequences will be dire for Europe and the rest of the world. If Putin is allowed to achieve any of his goals in Ukraine, he will not stop there. Russia will threaten more of its neighbors, from Moldova to the Baltic states, and destabilize the globe. Other regional and global powers will take note of his success and use similar tactics to achieve their aims. A Ukrainian defeat would mark the start of the unraveling of the international system. Self-doubt in the West will lead to self-defeating decisions. History shows that appeasing dictators does not lead to peace; it only breeds future conflict. That is why it is essential for Ukraine’s allies to step up their support in 2024 and show that “as long as it takes” also means “as much as it takes.”

As Putin pushes for a long war, Zelensky is working for a sustainable peace.

That philosophy was behind the Kyiv Security Compact we co-authored in 2022. That plan set out key principles for a series of long-term security guarantees that Ukraine needs from its allies to both win the war and prevent future Russian aggression. The compact formed the basis for the joint declaration of support for Ukraine that G-7 countries adopted on the sidelines of the NATO summit in Lithuania last July. As of today, 32 countries have signed on to this joint declaration and are holding consultations on bilateral agreements with Ukraine. These bilateral agreements will ensure that Ukrainian forces have the weapons they need to defeat Russia on the battlefield. Commitments to protect Ukraine over the long term refute Putin’s narrative that Western support for Ukraine is weakening.

Relying on its economic and demographic advantages, Russia is hoping to defeat Ukraine through a war of attrition. Therefore, Ukrainian victory relies on better utilizing the economic and industrial might of the democratic world, which dwarfs that of Russia and its allies. European countries, in particular, need to prepare their defense industries so they can effectively help Ukraine win this war. To do this, they should offer multi-year contracts for weapons, as well as guarantees, to give defense companies the certainty they need to ramp up production. Ukraine also needs its allies' support in developing its defense industry. Together, the West can vastly outproduce Russia. It just needs to show the political will, so that Putin understands his war is unwinnable and that Russian forces will be driven outside of Ukraine’s internationally recognized borders.

MEMBER OF THE CLUB

In addition to securing the long-term supply of weapons and munitions to Ukraine, it is crucial for Europe and the United States to start putting structures in place to ensure that Russia can never threaten Europe’s security again. Moving Ukraine along its path to EU membership is essential because it provides the political and financial framework for Ukraine to recover and rebuild. A prosperous Ukraine that is part of the EU can act as a bulwark against an autocratic and aggressive Russia. Ideologically, a successful and vibrant democracy in Ukraine is also a strong rebuke of Putin’s autocratic rule.

Membership will bring an added layer of security to Ukraine as well, through the mutual defense clause included in the treaties that govern the EU. This clause states that “if a Member State is the victim of armed aggression on its territory, the other Member States shall have towards it an obligation of aid and assistance by all the means in their power.” The threat of EU member states’ responding directly to future Russian aggression against Ukraine would be a powerful deterrent.

Long-term security guarantees and EU membership would go a long way toward protecting Ukraine, but neither can replace Article 5 of NATO’s founding treaty, which requires members to consider an armed attack against one of them as an attack against all. Bringing Ukraine into NATO remains the best way to bring lasting peace and security in Europe. At the December 14 press conference, Putin stated that Russia launched its invasion—or so called “special operation”—because Ukraine was set to join NATO. But the inverse is true: Russia could only invade Ukraine because it was not covered by NATO’s Article 5.

A volunteer attending basic training in the Kyiv region, Ukraine, January 2024

Viacheslav Ratynskyi / Reuters

If at the end of the war, Ukraine is left in the gray zone between Russia and NATO, it will be a recipe for further instability and Russian aggression. This is a reality that both Finland and Sweden quickly recognized. After the February 2022 invasion, both countries saw that in the face of an imperialist Russia, neutrality was no longer an option and that only NATO membership could guarantee their sovereignty. The same goes for Ukraine.

At NATO’s July 2023 summit, members announced that an invitation for Ukraine to join the alliance would be issued only once unspecified “conditions are met.” Ukraine had hoped for something more concrete than that. If Putin believes that Ukraine will only be allowed to join NATO when the fighting ends, it gives him an incentive to continue the war indefinitely. If Ukraine is invited to join the alliance beforehand, however, it could force him to stop.

Although the summit in Vilnius did not present Ukraine with a clear path toward NATO membership, there were positive developments. Members agreed to let Kyiv skip the “membership action plan” part of the traditional accession process, whereby countries submit annual reports about their progress on various security-related metrics. This exemption, which was also granted to Finland and Sweden, should accelerate Ukraine’s eventual accession. In Vilnius, the newly created Ukraine-NATO Council also held its first meeting, and it is already working on bringing Ukraine’s armed forces into alignment with NATO standards.

Still, at this year’s NATO summit in Washington, D.C., in July, the alliance’s leaders would bring the world closer to peace by wholeheartedly embracing Ukrainian membership. The time has come to issue an invitation for Ukraine to join NATO. That does not mean that Ukraine would become a member overnight, but it would send an unequivocal message to Putin that his war is already lost.

ANDERS FOGH RASMUSSEN is Founder of the Alliance of Democracies Foundation and Rasmussen Global. He was Secretary-General of NATO from 2009 to 2014 and Prime Minister of Denmark from 2001 to 2009.
ANDRIY YERMAK is Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine.

Foreign Affairs · by Anders Fogh Rasmussen and Andriy Yermak · January 11, 2024

27. Iran's 'Axis of Resistance' Becomes an 'Axis of Escalation' | Opinion

We need to take back the resistance moniker. It should be used to describe those who resist authoritarian regimes. We cannot let it be "romanticized" by those who oppose like indeed democracies around the world who support the rules based international order.

Iran's 'Axis of Resistance' Becomes an 'Axis of Escalation' | Opinion

Published 01/10/24 06:00 AM ET

Mark Toth and Col. (Ret.) Jonathan Sweet

themessenger.com · January 10, 2024

Iran’s “axis of resistance” is paralyzing U.S. foreign policy and national security interests across the Middle East — and thus far, the Biden administration has been far too complacent. Originally conceived by Qasem Soleimani, the former commander of the elite Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) who was killed by a U.S. airstrike in Baghdad in 2020, Tehran’s proxy armies have become fully operational under Soleimani’s successor, Esmail Ghaani, as detailed by Jason Brodsky and Yossi Mansharof for the Middle East Institute.

These fighters are also highly coordinated.

Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s militias do not act in a vacuum. Their use is targeted, and purposeful in design. Nor do they operate in a regional void. As Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “special military operation” in Ukraine continues to devolve into a World War I-like trench slugfest, Moscow and Tehran are using Iran’s axis of resistance on a geostrategic basis against Washington.

View it as Khamenei’s axis of resistance amalgamating with Putin’s rogue players we call his “arsenals of evil.” The exigencies of his war in Ukraine going awry are forging the growing partnership regionally and even globally.

Iranian drones continue to be widely deployed by the Kremlin in Ukraine. In Israel’s war with Hamas, the Iran-backed terrorist group is using North Korean made F-7 rockets, and Iran-backed Houthi rebels from Yemen are using Soviet-era Russian military helicopters to attack and interdict shipping in the Red Sea, Gulf of Aden, and Bab el-Mandeb Strait.

Predictably, President Biden dispatched Secretary of State Antony Blinken to Israel on Monday amidst “concerns about the war spilling out wider into the region,” CNN reported, in an attempt “to rein in [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s war campaign.”

Yet Israel is not the problem; Iran is.

Iran has this game down well. It escalates tensions in the Middle East to undermine U.S. national security interests and foreign policy initiatives, and then calculatingly waits for Biden and his national security team to instinctively work to de-escalate crises. Each time the Biden administration falls for this, U.S. interests and America’s reputation are diminished — and the nation’s military security is exposed.

The Oct. 7 attack by Hamas on Israel is probative in this regard. Khamenei and Ghaani — likely at Putin’s urging as cover for Moscow’s Oct. 9 counteroffensive in Avdiivka, Ukraine — escalated the situation by training Hamas fighters and tacitly approving their attack. As a result, U.S.-led efforts to normalize diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel were scuttled.

Also illustrative are the Iran-backed militia attacks on U.S. military forces in Iraq and Syria since Oct. 7. Excluding attacks by the Houthis, U.S. forces have come under attack more than 120 times. It wasn’t until Jan. 4 that the Pentagon demonstratively struck back, killing Moshtaq Talib Al-Saadi in Baghdad, a local Iraqi leader of the IRGC-sponsored militia group known as al-Nubjaba’a. Consequently, Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani wants 2,500 U.S. troops fighting ISIS out of Iraq — yet notably not Shia militants aligned with Iran.

In Lebanon, Hezbollah, like Hamas and the Houthis, also plays an important role on behalf of Khamenei and Ghaani. The Shia militia group headed by Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah has continued to shell northern Israel, forcing the displacement of Israeli civilians and damaging Israel’s domestic economy.

On Tuesday, as retaliation for Israel’s killing of senior Hamas leader Saleh al-Arouri in a suburb of Beirut, Hezbollah conducted a drone strike on the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) northern headquarters. Al-Arouri, who was Hamas’s military commander in the West Bank, had fled to Lebanon after the IDF began its ground incursion into the Gaza Strip.

Early on in the war against Hamas, Israel deferred to a White House request that Jerusalem avoid preemptively striking Hezbollah. Once again, the Biden administration’s fears of regional escalation weighed heavily in Washington’s calculus.

Increasingly, however, Israel views Hezbollah as a serious threat that, unless dealt with, could transform into an existential threat given its partnership with Tehran. Israel’s repeated attacks on Hezbollah positions in Lebanon appear to be designed to force the issue. Thus far, Nasrallah’s response has been muted.

That in itself is telling. Iran likely intends for Hezbollah to serve as a distraction, to shift Israel’s focus away from Iran’s effort to become a nuclear power. In early January, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) warned that Iran was accelerating enrichment of its Uranium-235 to near weapons grade, and that it likely could construct as many as five nuclear bombs in under 30 days.

The Biden administration’s response to the IAEA report? The U.S. issued a joint statement with France, Germany and the United Kingdom condemning Iran and urging reengagement with the IAEA. The communiqué ended as weakly as it started: “We remain committed to a diplomatic solution and reaffirm our determination that Iran must never develop a nuclear weapon.”

Washington policymakers must begin connecting the dots in these national security matters. Putin’s arsenals of evil have aligned their interests with Khamenei’s axis of resistance, and collectively they have metamorphosed into an “axis of escalation” serving the interests of Russia, Iran, North Korea and, tangentially, China, as it ramps up its machinations against Taiwan.

Have the president’s men run out of ideas? Biden needs to consider bringing in subject matter experts from outside the administration to generate new ideas — as President John Kennedy did with the National Security Council Executive Committee during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

These are not regional crises in need of White House de-escalation efforts. They are codependent and need to be confronted proactively. The Biden administration must stop allowing Iran to manipulate it into inaction or defensive posturing. Iran’s axis of resistance must be confronted. If not, the U.S. risks escalating a nuclear crisis in the Mideast itself.

Franklin Roosevelt wisely said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” It is time to stop fearing escalation.

Mark Toth, an economist and entrepreneur, is a former board member of the World Trade Center, St. Louis.

Col. (Ret.) Jonathan Sweet served 30 years as a military intelligence officer and led the U.S. European Command Intelligence Engagement Division from 2012 to 2014.

themessenger.com · January 10, 2024

28. Don’t Bomb the Houthis

Careful diplomacy? Really? If we do not stop these attacks we are going to allow the creation of a new normal that will not be good for the world.

Excerpts:

Washington cannot count on public support from its Gulf partners. Although some of the commercial ships the Houthis have targeted have no apparent links to Israel, the fact that they have repeatedly called their attacks an effort to support Palestinians limits the degree to which Arab states can respond to Houthi aggression, even if they were inclined to get involved. Public opinion in Saudi Arabia, for instance, has turned even further against establishing diplomatic ties with Israel. Gulf states have little incentive to risk the wrath of their publics. Aside from Bahrain, the Arab states have been reluctant to publicly associate themselves with the multinational operation that the Pentagon announced in mid-December.

Still, that operation is a useful first step to demonstrate international opposition to Houthi aggression and to intercept and deter attacks. The United States must also continue to support the UN’s efforts to negotiate a sustainable peace in Yemen. The 2022 truce agreement has held, more or less, and the parties are close to a deal that would make the cease-fire permanent and launch talks about the long-term future of Yemen’s governance.

To deal with the threat posed by the Houthis, ultimately the United States must push for an end to the war between Israel and Hamas—as well as to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in general. Like it or not, the Houthis have linked their aggression to Israel’s operations in Gaza and have won domestic and regional support for doing so. Finding a sustainable, long-term approach to both conflicts will be critical to de-escalating tensions across the region and getting the Houthis to call off their attacks on commercial vessels. Such attacks would have limited utility in the absence of these conflicts.

These measures cannot fully address the threat that the Houthis pose to U.S. interests and to stability in the region more broadly. But they remain the best among bad options—and the United States has only bad options because of its failed approaches to Yemen over the past 20 years. Washington must not repeat its mistakes. Decades of experience have shown, by now, that military efforts to dislodge the Houthis are unlikely to be effective. Instead, they may merely further devastate the lives of the already struggling people of Yemen.

Don’t Bomb the Houthis

Careful Diplomacy Can Stop the Attacks in the Red Sea

By Alexandra Stark

January 11, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by Alexandra Stark · January 11, 2024

The conflict between the United States and the Houthis in the Red Sea is steadily escalating. On December 31, Houthi small boats attempted to attack a commercial vessel; after U.S. naval helicopters responded to the attack, the Houthis—a rebel group that controls territory inhabited by 80 percent of Yemen’s population—fired on them. U.S. forces returned fire, sinking three Houthi boats and killing ten crew members. Then on January 9, the Houthis launched one of their largest attacks in the Red Sea to date including 18 drones, two anti-ship cruise missiles, and one anti-ship ballistic missile, which were intercepted by U.S. and UK forces.

This engagement represented just the latest in a series of attacks in the Red Sea. Since mid-November, the Houthis have launched more than 20 attacks on commercial vessels in the Red Sea, a strategically critical strait that is transited by 15 percent of global trade. Characterizing their attacks as a response to the Israel-Hamas war, they have also fired missiles and drones toward southern Israel. The Red Sea attacks have forced some shipping companies to temporarily suspend sailing through the Suez Canal, routing instead around the Horn of Africa, a change that adds about ten days to their journey. The attacks have not yet led to a significant disruption in global trade, but over the long term, the rising shipping costs they provoke are likely to increase oil prices and the cost of consumer goods worldwide.

In response, the United States has mobilized international partners, launching in mid-December a multinational initiative aimed at protecting commercial vessels in the Red Sea. And on January 3, these partners issued a joint statement that U.S. officials indicated should serve as a final warning to the Houthis before Washington took more drastic action. U.S. officials are now considering military attacks on Houthi targets.

Because the Houthi attacks could have serious consequences for global commerce, the United States is under substantial pressure to respond militarily. But instead of retaliatory strikes, the U.S. should favor a diplomatic approach. The Houthis may be recent entrants FIX into international newspaper headlines, but they have been challenging the United States and its Gulf partners for two decades. And the use of force against the Houthis in the past, whether by former President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s regime or by a Saudi-led effort to reinstate the government the Houthis overturned in the mid-2010s, has merely allowed the group to refine its military capabilities and portray itself as a heroic resistance movement, bolstering its legitimacy at home.

Indeed, the group needed a boost: it faced growing domestic resistance before October 7. Now, however, its response to Israel’s operations in Gaza appears to have won support in Yemen and across the region. Retaliatory strikes would also increase the likelihood that the Israel-Hamas war will expand across the region and that the civil war in Yemen will resume. Over the past year and a half, a UN-negotiated truce kept serious conflict in Yemen at bay, but direct U.S. strikes on Houthi targets could reignite internal warfare. The United States has few good options to respond to Houthi attacks. But a diplomatic push for a sustainable peace in the war in Yemen while continuing efforts to deter Houthi attacks alongside international partners is the least bad of them.

BLAST RESISTANCE

The Houthi movement began in the 1990s, when a group then calling itself Ansar Allah (“Supporters of God”) began to resist Saudi proselytizing of Wahabism and to assert Zaidi identity and religious practice across Yemen. Zaidism is a variant of Shiism local to northern Yemen and parts of southern Saudi Arabia. There are important doctrinal differences between mainstream Shiism and Zaidi Islam: mainstream Shiites recognize 12 imams, for instance, while Zaidis recognize only five.

But as the movement came to oppose the corruption endemic in Saleh’s regime—and his partnership with the United States in the global “war on terror”—it gained Yemeni supporters beyond the Zaidi community. Media accounts sometimes portray Yemen’s long-running civil conflict as sectarian strife between Sunnis and Shiites. In fact, throughout the early years of the twenty-first century, notes Marieke Brandt, an anthropologist who has studied the Houthis extensively, the Ansar Allah movement expanded to become “a catalyst with the potential to unite all those [in northern Yemen] . . . who felt economically neglected, politically ostracized and religiously marginalized.”

In response to the movement’s rising prominence, beginning in 2004, Saleh’s government launched six brutal rounds of fighting—killing the group’s charismatic leader, Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi. But these military efforts failed to root out the movement. Instead, Ansar Allah gained new adherents and enshrined its founders’ family members as its leaders.

Years of airstrikes against the Houthis only aggravated the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

When the Arab Spring came to Yemen in 2011, Saleh was eventually forced to step down, yielding to his vice president, Abd-Rabu Mansur Hadi. But the country’s democratic consolidation faltered when the National Dialogue Conference, a 2013–14 process meant to negotiate a transition to democracy, fell apart. Recognizing a power vacuum, the Houthis took over Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, in September 2014 and then attempted to extend their influence south, seizing control of most of the country.

The Houthis’ 2014 rise provoked alarm in neighboring countries, most notably Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Around this time, the Houthis also began to receive support from Iran and their proxy Hezbollah—adversaries to the Saudis and Emiratis. In 2015, a coalition led by those two countries—and supported by the United States, the United Kingdom, and France—intervened militarily, launching airstrikes to support other military organizations that nominally backed Hadi’s government.

But instead of restoring peace, the airstrikes helped aggravate a war that resulted in what the United Nations has called the worst humanitarian crisis in the world. Between 2015 and 2022, airstrikes by the Saudi-led coalition—backed by U.S. intelligence-sharing, aerial refueling, and aircraft maintenance—killed an estimated 9,000 Yemeni civilians. Four-and-a-half million Yemenis are displaced, and more than 21 million, or two-thirds of Yemen’s population, remain in need of humanitarian assistance and protection.

GROWTH OPPORTUNITY

As the Houthis solidified their control over much of northern Yemen, they began to seek more visibility on the regional stage. Their slickly produced, Beirut-based media channel, Al Masirah, produces content in both Arabic and English to share their perspective with a broader audience. Houthi traditional poems, set to music and video and widely shared on social media, declare Houthi opposition to Israel and the United States.

To understand the Houthis’ goals, it is worth taking seriously what they themselves say they want. Since about 2003, the Houthis’ sarkha—their motto, usually printed in green and red—echoes the slogan of revolutionary Iran and proclaims Houthi values and aims in no uncertain terms: “God is great, death to America, death to Israel, a curse on the Jews, victory to Islam.” In their public statements, Houthi leaders have repeatedly framed their current attacks as a response to Israeli operations in Gaza. Their intent, they say, is to pressure Israel to de-escalate its war against Hamas.

But this rhetorical posturing has also allowed the Houthis to build legitimacy in Yemen and across the Middle East, diverting attention from their failures at home, where their popularity has eroded in recent years. They have been unable to deliver economic growth to the poorest country in the Middle East and North Africa. The Houthis are also brutally repressive, torturing and executing journalists, arresting and detaining peaceful protesters, and restricting the rights of women and girls. Many Yemenis increasingly see the Houthis as driven by a desire to establish a totalitarian religious state that protects Zaidi elites’ power.

The Houthis have used their attacks in the Red Sea and on Israel to demonstrate their importance to Iran.

In September 2023, protests against the Houthis for failing to pay public-sector salaries were followed by arrests, but the Houthi leadership recognized it had a problem. In September 2023, they announced they were preparing a “radical change” to their government to address corruption and economic problems—before the Israel-Hamas war gave them a new opportunity to gain legitimacy. A Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research poll conducted in late November and early December of 2023 found that residents of Gaza and the West Bank ranked Yemen’s response to the Israel-Hamas war as the most satisfying among regional actors. The Houthis have trumpeted Yemeni pro-Palestine demonstrations as evidence of their support for the Palestinian people.

Regionally, the Houthis have used their attacks in the Red Sea and on Israel to demonstrate their importance to Iran’s “axis of resistance,” the network of state and nonstate actors that Iran has leveraged to spread its influence across the region and encircle its opponents, including Israel and Saudi Arabia. The partnership between Iran and the Houthis deepened substantially over the course of Yemen’s civil war. Iran values the Houthis because they allow Tehran to act more widely while maintaining plausible deniability. The Houthis, for instance, claimed responsibility for a September 2019 drone attack on Saudi oil facilities, but the attack is widely believed to have been carried out by Iran. Until the April 2022 truce in Yemen, the Houthis were also launching an escalating series of strikes facilitated by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps–Quds Force on territory within Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

The Quds Force has helped the Houthis build stockpiles of sophisticated weapons, including unmanned aerial vehicles and missiles. Since approximately 2016, Iran has helped the Houthis learn to assemble their own weapons using parts from abroad, outrunning the international community’s efforts to prevent the smuggling of weapons into Yemen. The fact that the Houthis are now able to launch missiles directed at Israel and commercial vessels—while, thus far, avoiding significant retaliation—is undoubtedly further demonstrating the group’s strategic value to Iran. Tehran has offered support to the Houthi attacks, sharing intelligence to assist attacks in the Red Sea and moving its own warship into those waters.

STRIKE OUT

International actors must respond to the Houthis’ attacks, both to preserve the Red Sea shipping route and to prevent further regional escalation. But the United States is confronted by an array of bad and worse options for how to do so. Some politicians and analysts have argued that the best way to counter Houthi aggression is with military escalation designed to “restore deterrence.” This perspective sees the United States’ eventual decision, in 2021, to push for peace negotiations in Yemen as a failed policy of appeasement.

But proponents of airstrikes against the Houthis cannot articulate what should happen afterward. It is hard to see how airstrikes would deter Houthi attacks now when they have failed to do so over the past decade. Airstrikes against Houthi targets might marginally erode the Houthis’ ability to launch missiles and drones, but it will be much harder to effectively target and eradicate the Houthis’ small, cheap manned and unmanned boats.

Likewise, designating the Houthis a foreign terrorist organization, as the Trump administration did briefly in 2020, would likely have little effect. Their leaders have long been under U.S. sanctions, and they would no doubt simply use the designation as further proof that they can get a rise out of powerful adversaries. But the FTO designation would certainly make the delivery of humanitarian aid to Yemen more difficult.

An approach that combines diplomacy with deterrence is the least bad way for the United States to deal with this intractable problem in the near term. There is little international appetite for a military response. Even Saudi Arabia, which led the 2015 military intervention against the Houthis, is now cautioning the United States to act with restraint.

To deal with the Houthi threat, the United States must push for an end to the war between Israel and Hamas.

Washington cannot count on public support from its Gulf partners. Although some of the commercial ships the Houthis have targeted have no apparent links to Israel, the fact that they have repeatedly called their attacks an effort to support Palestinians limits the degree to which Arab states can respond to Houthi aggression, even if they were inclined to get involved. Public opinion in Saudi Arabia, for instance, has turned even further against establishing diplomatic ties with Israel. Gulf states have little incentive to risk the wrath of their publics. Aside from Bahrain, the Arab states have been reluctant to publicly associate themselves with the multinational operation that the Pentagon announced in mid-December.

Still, that operation is a useful first step to demonstrate international opposition to Houthi aggression and to intercept and deter attacks. The United States must also continue to support the UN’s efforts to negotiate a sustainable peace in Yemen. The 2022 truce agreement has held, more or less, and the parties are close to a deal that would make the cease-fire permanent and launch talks about the long-term future of Yemen’s governance.

To deal with the threat posed by the Houthis, ultimately the United States must push for an end to the war between Israel and Hamas—as well as to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in general. Like it or not, the Houthis have linked their aggression to Israel’s operations in Gaza and have won domestic and regional support for doing so. Finding a sustainable, long-term approach to both conflicts will be critical to de-escalating tensions across the region and getting the Houthis to call off their attacks on commercial vessels. Such attacks would have limited utility in the absence of these conflicts.

These measures cannot fully address the threat that the Houthis pose to U.S. interests and to stability in the region more broadly. But they remain the best among bad options—and the United States has only bad options because of its failed approaches to Yemen over the past 20 years. Washington must not repeat its mistakes. Decades of experience have shown, by now, that military efforts to dislodge the Houthis are unlikely to be effective. Instead, they may merely further devastate the lives of the already struggling people of Yemen.

ALEXANDRA STARK is an Associate Policy Researcher at the RAND Corporation and the author of the forthcoming book The Yemen Model.

Foreign Affairs · by Alexandra Stark · January 11, 2024

29. Opinion | Lloyd Austin doesn’t deserve to be the piñata of the day in Washington

Conclusion:

As with many people, Austin’s greatest weakness is the flip side of his greatest strength. While it’s good that he is neither a show-boater nor a self-promoter, he can also be too private and too uncommunicative. That is what has now gotten him into trouble. But his failure to be more forthcoming about his health crisis should not negate all the good he has done — or lead Biden to throw him to the howling pack of wolves that are always ready to rip to shreds any officeholder in Washington.

Opinion | Lloyd Austin doesn’t deserve to be the piñata of the day in Washington

The Washington Post · by Max Boot · January 10, 2024

One of the most lamentable — and, to an outsider, inexplicable — features of Washington life is the political and press pile-on when some public figure has made a mistake, however minor. Before long, the Beltway cognoscenti are acting as if some soon-to-be-forgotten incident is a combination of Teapot Dome, Watergate, Iran-contra and Jan. 6, 2021, all wrapped into one.

Now it is Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s turn to be the designated piñata for so many of the pent-up grievances of the political class. He, admittedly, erred in not promptly notifying the White House and the public of his ongoing treatment for prostate cancer. Anyone who knows Austin knows that he is an intensely private person, and it is understandable that he wanted to keep details of his health condition to himself.

In this case, that was a mistake, as he has now acknowledged. Being a Cabinet officer, he has sacrificed the right of privacy enjoyed by ordinary patients. But his very human failing hardly warrants the degree of caterwauling we are now hearing, not only from Republicans but also from some independent analysts.

Calls for Austin’s resignation are growing. Republicans are now adding Austin’s name to the long line of officeholders — from the president on down — who they want to impeach. The rhetorical escalation is occurring at an alarming rate: Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) claims that Austin “has been a disaster since Day One and should be replaced by someone who will focus on making the military ready to fight and win wars instead of advancing woke political causes.” Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) calls this a “shocking defiance of the law” and says it “further erodes trust in the Biden administration.” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) huffs: “If this report is true, there must be consequences for this shocking breakdown.”

I wish I could say I am shocked by all this faux-shock, but in truth I’m not surprised in the slightest. This is the way of Washington: Republicans are bent on bringing down the Biden administration and they have a particular animus against the Defense Department, which they castigate, with no evidence, for supposed “wokeness.” Austin’s slip-up gives them an opening to attack, and they are charging like Napoleon’s cavalry into the breach.

Amid all this “Sturm und Drang,” it’s easy to lose sight of the key issue: Was there a breakdown in national command authorities? The defense secretary is in the chain of command for the use of military force. It runs from the president to the secretary to the commanders in the field (except in the case of nuclear weapons where the chain of command runs from the president straight to the National Military Command Center in the Pentagon). So was there a period of time while Austin was in the hospital, where, if an emergency had occurred necessitating the use of force, there was no one available to give the command?

The Pentagon press secretary, Maj. Gen. Patrick S. Ryder, assured me on Wednesday that this was not the case: “At no time was there a gap in chain of command of Department of Defense command and control,” he said. “There was never any risk to national security.” According to Ryder, both times when Austin went into the hospital — first on Dec. 22 for his prostate cancer surgery and then again on Jan. 1 to deal with complications resulting from that surgery — “operational authorities” were duly transferred to the deputy defense secretary, Kathleen Hicks. If the United States or its forces had been attacked at that time, she could have given the order to respond, even from her Puerto Rico vacation. (Austin is still in the hospital, but on Jan. 5, he resumed operational command.)

Hicks has said that she didn’t realize until days later that Austin was in the hospital. It’s puzzling that Austin didn’t keep her better informed, but from what Ryder told me, it’s not uncommon to transfer operational authorities without giving the reason. Sometimes, he said, it’s for something as simple as the defense secretary traveling on an aircraft that lacks the full suite of communications capabilities to command and control U.S. forces worldwide. Ryder added that the secretary’s office has now changed its policy to ensure that it notifies everyone of why authorities are being temporarily transferred — not just when.

“We’ve all learned through this process,” Ryder told me. “Secretary Austin has taken full responsibility on the need to keep the public informed and we’re looking to do better. But this situation doesn’t change who Lloyd Austin is as a person. He’s still the same dedicated public servant, and he is just as committed to defending the country.”

Indeed, we should all be grateful that Austin is the defense secretary after the tumult and chaos of the Trump years. President Donald Trump had five secretaries of defense (three of them “acting”), and he sent unqualified political hacks to try to take de facto control of the Defense Department. Gen. Mark A. Milley, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, worried that Trump would try to stage a military coup.

Austin has restored a sense of calmness to the armed forces with his understated command presence. He has made clear that the military will uphold the Constitution, and he has sought to root out extremists in the military’s ranks, thereby earning himself the ire of the “Jan. 6 Party.” He hasn’t gotten everything right, but the biggest screw up on his watch — the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 — was not his fault. He warned President Biden against the pullout. But when Biden gave the order anyway, Austin executed it without leaking his disagreement to news organizations.

The world crises on Austin’s watch have played to his strengths. As a former Army general, he has been well positioned to marshal a vast coalition to help Ukraine survive the biggest invasion Europe has seen since 1945. And as a former head of U.S. Central Command, he has been well positioned to deal with the fallout from the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, with the resulting rise in tensions between the United States and Iran and its proxies.

As with many people, Austin’s greatest weakness is the flip side of his greatest strength. While it’s good that he is neither a show-boater nor a self-promoter, he can also be too private and too uncommunicative. That is what has now gotten him into trouble. But his failure to be more forthcoming about his health crisis should not negate all the good he has done — or lead Biden to throw him to the howling pack of wolves that are always ready to rip to shreds any officeholder in Washington.

The Washington Post · by Max Boot · January 10, 2024

30. Analysis | Senators warn AI could lead to ‘destruction’ of local news

Analysis | Senators warn AI could lead to ‘destruction’ of local news

The Washington Post · by Cristiano Lima-Strong · January 11, 2024

Happy Thursday! If my phone could survive a fall from my clumsy hands, that would be enough for me. Send news tips to: cristiano.lima@washpost.com.

Below: The crypto industry notched a regulatory win, and a sanctioned oligarch ran pro-Kremlin Facebook ads. First:

Senators warn AI could lead to ‘destruction’ of local news

Lawmakers on Capitol Hill have tried for years to pass legislation to give news outlets more bargaining power against the tech giants, warning that their dominance over digital ads is decimating the industry — most of all, local news.

But at a hearing Wednesday, senators zeroed in on how a new perceived threat could hurt the news industry: the rise of generative artificial intelligence.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), whose subcommittee held the session on AI and journalism, said declining news revenue and technological changes are creating a “perfect storm” that is “accelerating and expanding the destruction of local reporting.”

AI could pose a dual threat to outlets, with developers seizing on their work to train AI models “without compensation or credit” while enabling the creation of lightly staffed news sources to compete with them, he warned.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), who has proposed legislation to let news organizations band together during negotiations with the tech giants, said she was “very concerned” that the decline of local news would “only worsen with the rise of generative AI.”

The session took place during a critical time in the debate.

The New York Times last month sued OpenAI and Microsoft over their alleged use of its copyright articles to train their AI systems. It marked the latest in lawsuits accusing tech companies of violating content creators’ intellectual property.

The cases, as my colleagues Will Oremus and Elahe Izadi wrote last week, “have the potential to rattle the foundations of the booming generative AI industry.”

OpenAI fired back in a blog post Monday, calling the Times lawsuit “without merit” and arguing that its use of “publicly available internet materials” to train its products was protected under a legal principle known as “fair use.”

The ChatGPT maker also accused the Times of “not telling the full story,” saying the two companies had been engaged in “negotiations focused on a high-value partnership” as recently as December to display and attribute the publication in OpenAI’s products.

While the courts consider those legal challenges, some news outlets are moving ahead and partnering with AI developers, including local news organizations.

Politico parent company Axel Springer in December announced a deal for OpenAI to display “summaries of selected global news content” from the outlet in ChatGPT. Financial terms were not disclosed, but the Times reported that the deal netted the German media giant more than $10 million. (Disclosure: I previously worked for Politico.) The Associated Press unveiled a similar news-sharing deal back in July.

OpenAI last year also struck a $5 million deal with the American Journalism Project to support efforts by local publications to experiment with AI tools.

Some news organizations, meanwhile, are leaning on the tools in an attempt to fill gaps in their local coverage. News Corp., parent company of the Wall Street Journal and Fox News, has said it is producing thousands of weekly local news stories in Australia using generative AI. Small outlets that rely heavily on generative AI to produce content have popped up in recent months, including around Boston.

Blumenthal argued that while there’s major potential in using AI to augment journalism, it should not “replace” members of the press, especially locally.

“It’s never a substitute for local reporters in local newsrooms, broadcasters, journalists who reflect their community and talk to their neighbors,” Blumenthal said.

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Regulators approve new bitcoin fund in win for crypto industry

Federal regulators on Wednesday greenlit a new tool that tracks the price of bitcoin, “a major decision that could lead to the cryptocurrency becoming more mainstream just over a year after the crypto markets crashed,” our colleague Gerrit de Vynck writes.

The Securities and Exchange Commission authorization means that “banks and investment firms will now be able to sell exchange traded funds, or ETFs, that own bitcoin to regular consumers,” rather than going through crypto trading firms like Coinbase, Gerrit reports. “Now, retail investors will be able to buy the bitcoin ETFs in the same way they might buy a public company’s stock or a mutual fund.”

Hailed by the crypto industry as a major win, the decision could lift “some of the stigma that has clung to bitcoin for years, especially after high-profile cryptocurrency scams and business failures,” he adds.

The announcement came a day after hackers seized the agency’s X account to claim that the funds had already been approved, as my colleague Joseph Menn reported.

U.S.-sanctioned oligarch repeatedly ran pro-Kremlin ads on Facebook

A Moldovan oligarch with ties to the Kremlin ran hundreds of Facebook ads just months after the company said it would block them, Wired’s David Gilbert reports.

“Last February, when researchers at London-based nonprofit Reset found that Meta was allowing Ilan Shor, a Moldovan oligarch with links to the Kremlin, to run an ad campaign on Facebook, the company promised to stop him,” according to the report. “But Shor, whom the United States sanctioned for illegally financing political parties in Moldova and pushing Russian disinformation, wasn’t finished.”

New research by the nonprofit uncovered that over six months, Shor and his groups ran “more than 100 fake Facebook pages to run hundreds of ads that amassed 155 million impressions and earned Meta at least $200,000 in revenue.”

“Malicious actors like this are persistent, and as we’ve said before, we’ve previously detected efforts to use other Pages and accounts in an attempt to amplify content related to him,” said Ben Walters, a Meta spokesperson. “We have and will continue to take action when we find inauthentic behavior, or content, or ads that violate our policies.”

Amazon declines to offer E.U. concessions in iRobot case

Tech giant Amazon is declining to offer concessions to the European Union as it looks to lock down approval for its proposed $1.4 billion takeover of digital vacuuming company iRobot, Politico Europe’s Josh Sisco and Aoife White report.

“The companies have until the end of the day on Wednesday to make an offer to tackle European Union objections that Amazon could hamper rival vacuum cleaners’ sales on Amazon’s online marketplace, which regulators said is a particularly important sales channel for the product,” according to the report. The final deadline for the E.U. to clear or veto the deal is Feb. 14.

Amazon declined to comment, and the commission’s press office didn’t respond to a request for comment, the report said.

Before you log off

man thats wild why hasnt the news industry thought of this https://t.co/9hyU8gKh4Y

— angel (@angelmendoza___) January 9, 2024

That’s all for today — thank you so much for joining us! Make sure to tell others to subscribe to The Technology 202 here. Get in touch with tips, feedback or greetings on X or email.

The Washington Post · by Cristiano Lima-Strong · January 11, 2024

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

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

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

Access NSS HERE

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