Quotes of the Day:
"The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults."
- Alexis de Tocqueville
“The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism.”
- George Washington
“How strangely will the Tools of a Tyrant pervert the plain Meaning of Words!”
-- Samuel Adams
1. U.S. Considers Backing an Insurgency, After Battling One
2. U.S. Names Official to Counter Foreign Election Interference
3. Meeting China’s hypersonic challenge
4. Russian Agents in Ukraine Are Trying to Create a Pretext for Invasion, Pentagon Says
5. Negotiate Like Putin
6. Russia, China and the Bid for Empire by Robert D. Kaplan
7. What the Thucydides Trap gets wrong about China
8. China Is Watching Ukraine With a Lot of Interest
9. Iran says 25-year China agreement enters implementation stage
10. US needs more Asians to avoid demographic death
11. Reed aims for fresh push to confirm Biden’s Pentagon nominees
12. Britain’s Security Agency MI5 Warns Lawmakers of China’s Political Interference
13. U.S. Diplomats in Geneva, Paris Struck With Suspected ‘Havana Syndrome’
14. It is time to do away with the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy
15. Japan a valuable partner in resistance to China’s authoritarian advances
16. At Request of U.S., Russia Rounds Up 14 REvil Ransomware Affiliates
17. Seditious Conspiracy: What to Make of the Latest Oath Keepers Indictment
18. Psy-Ops are a crucial weapon in the war against disinformation
19. Analysis: China is still the ultimate prize that Western banks can't resist
20. Analysis | Lithuania is learning the cost of standing up to China. Without E.U. backing, it may be forced to sit back down.
21. U.S. veterans urge Biden admin not to release frozen funds to Iran
22. Will Biden’s Conventional Arms Transfer policy be an evolution or a revolution?
23. Nathan Law’s Lesson for Democracies
1. U.S. Considers Backing an Insurgency, After Battling One
Sigh...And then there is this:
Funding and supporting an insurgency is difficult, defense planners and military experts said. It requires developing a long-game mind-set and keeping up morale among fighters in the face of a state-sanctioned enemy that is backed by heavy weaponry.
I would rather support an insurgency than counter one.
Please... someone study the art and science of unconventional warfare.
U.S. Considers Backing an Insurgency, After Battling One
Conversations about supporting Ukrainian insurgents in the event of a Russian invasion has revived the specter of a new Cold War.
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Ukrainian troops took part in a military exercise near Kyiv in December. Russia has amassed about 100,000 troops at its borders with the country.
By
Jan. 14, 2022, 10:04 a.m. ET
WASHINGTON — For years, U.S. officials have tiptoed around the question of how much military support to provide to Ukraine, for fear of provoking Russia.
Now, in what would be a major turnaround, senior Biden administration officials are warning that the United States could throw its weight behind a Ukrainian insurgency should President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia invade Ukraine.
How the United States, which just exited two decades of war in Afghanistan, might pivot to funding and supporting an insurgency from fighting one is still being worked out. But even a conversation about how far the United States would go to subvert Russian aims in the event of an invasion has revived the specter of a new Cold War and suddenly made real the prospect of the beginnings of a so-called great power conflict.
In Afghanistan, the United States showed itself to be dismal at fighting insurgencies. But when it comes to funding them, military experts say it is a different ballgame.
But Biden administration officials have begun signaling to Russia, which has massed about 100,000 troops at its borders with Ukraine, that even if it managed to swiftly capture territory, Mr. Putin would eventually find the costs of an invasion prohibitively expensive in terms of military losses.
“If Putin invades Ukraine with a major military force, U.S. and NATO military assistance — intelligence, cyber, anti-armor and anti-air weapons, offensive naval missiles — would ratchet up significantly,” said James Stavridis, a retired four-star Navy admiral who was the supreme allied commander at NATO. “And if it turned into a Ukrainian insurgency, Putin should realize that after fighting insurgencies ourselves for two decades, we know how to arm, train and energize them.”
He pointed to American support for the mujahedeen in Afghanistan against the Soviet invasion there in the late 1970s and 1980s, before the rise of the Taliban. “The level of military support” for a Ukrainian insurgence, Admiral Stavridis said, “would make our efforts in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union look puny by comparison.”
Both Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III and Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have warned their Russian counterparts in recent telephone calls that any swift Russian victory in Ukraine would probably be followed by a bloody insurgency similar to the one that drove the Soviet Union from Afghanistan. In discussions with allies, senior Biden officials have also made clear that the C.I.A. (covertly) and the Pentagon (overtly) would both seek to help any Ukrainian insurgency.
Administration officials interviewed this week said that plans to help Ukrainian insurgents could include providing training in nearby countries that are part of NATO’s eastern flank: Poland, Romania and Slovakia, which could enable insurgents to slip in and out of Ukraine. Beyond logistical support and weapons, the United States and NATO allies could also provide medical equipment, services and even sanctuary during Russian offensives. The United States would almost certainly supply weapons, the officials said.
Since Russia invaded Crimea in 2014, successive U.S. administrations have taken pains to limit military support to Ukraine largely to defensive weaponry. The United States has provided about $2.5 billion in military aid to Kyiv, including anti-tank missiles and radar that enables the Ukrainian military to better spot sources of artillery fire. The assistance has also included patrol boats and communications equipment.
The United States is also moving toward providing Ukraine with battlefield intelligence that could help the country more quickly respond to an invasion, senior administration officials said.
But all of that aid has been calibrated not to provoke Mr. Putin, officials said. If Russian troops crossed the border, the officials said, the United States could offer offensive weaponry and training.
“Given the right equipment and tactics, Ukraine can dramatically reduce the chances of a successful invasion,” a former Ukrainian defense minister, Andriy P. Zagorodnyuk, wrote in an op-ed for the Atlantic Council on Sunday that reads like an instructional manual for how the United States can support an insurgency. “By combining serving military units with combat veterans, reservists, territorial defense units and large numbers of volunteers, Ukraine can create tens of thousands of small and highly mobile groups capable of attacking Russian forces. This will make it virtually impossible for the Kremlin to establish any kind of administration over occupied areas or secure its lines of supply.”
But it is difficult to know whether Ukrainians would be willing to start an insurgency campaign that could drag on for years or even decades. Some Ukraine experts point to Crimea, where there has been little armed resistance since Russia invaded. And Mr. Putin could limit his siege to the eastern parts of Ukraine, which lean more pro-Russian than the west.
Understand the Escalating Tensions Over Ukraine
Card 1 of 5
Ominous warnings. Russia called the strike a destabilizing act that violated the cease-fire agreement, raising fears of a new intervention in Ukraine that could draw the United States and Europe into a new phase of the conflict.
The Kremlin’s position. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who has increasingly portrayed NATO’s eastward expansion as an existential threat to his country, said that Moscow’s military buildup was a response to Ukraine’s deepening partnership with the alliance.
A Western military adviser to the Ukrainians said that details of a specific resistance there remained a closely held secret. But already, particularly in the west, Ukrainians are joining territorial defense forces that train in guerrilla tactics.
The Biden administration and its NATO allies want to capitalize on any distaste the Russian body politic might have for troop casualties, U.S. and European officials said in interviews. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss planning.
Funding and supporting an insurgency is difficult, defense planners and military experts said. It requires developing a long-game mind-set and keeping up morale among fighters in the face of a state-sanctioned enemy that is backed by heavy weaponry.
Russian retaliation against Ukrainian insurgents is likely to be “swift, direct and very brutal,” said Seth G. Jones, the director of the international security program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “It’s likely to get bloody.”
Mr. Jones also suggested that Russia might start to build some type of wall along Ukraine’s borders with NATO countries, putting a new Iron Curtain in place.
But Evelyn N. Farkas, who was the deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia in the Obama administration, when Russia invaded Crimea, recalled a debate at the time about how tough the United States could be with Russia without provoking further action. Eight years later, she noted that Mr. Putin is still threatening the country’s sovereignty.
In an interview, she said that this time around, “I think the gloves should come off.”
Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.
2. U.S. Names Official to Counter Foreign Election Interference
I would like to read the campaign plan for countering foreign election interference.
U.S. Names Official to Counter Foreign Election Interference
The director of national intelligence appointed a C.I.A. veteran to the post amid delays in congressional approval of money for a new office to oversee threats to American politics from abroad.
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The Office of the Director of National Intelligence in McLean, Va. Intelligence agencies have begun stepping up election threat monitoring ahead of this year’s midterm elections.Credit...T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York Times
By
Jan. 14, 2022
WASHINGTON — The director of national intelligence, Avril D. Haines, has appointed a new officer to oversee threats to elections, filling a critical role in the nation’s efforts to counter foreign election interference, her office said on Friday.
The new officer, Jeffrey Wichman, who has worked at the C.I.A. for more than three decades, will take over as the election threats executive at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence next week, said Nicole de Haay, a spokeswoman for the director of national intelligence.
Individual intelligence agencies like the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command have already begun stepping up election threat monitoring ahead of this year’s midterm elections. But without a new election threats executive, some on Capitol Hill had feared progress had stalled, coordination had diminished and important analytical differences had been left unresolved.
Mr. Wichman’s appointment came after the Office of the Director of National Intelligence was forced to delay plans to create a foreign malign influence center that would oversee efforts from abroad to influence elections and American politics more generally. Creation of that center has been slowed by disagreements on Capitol Hill over the size of the effort and its funding.
Mr. Wichman is currently the director of analysis for the C.I.A.’s counterintelligence mission center, and he previously served as a senior cyber analyst in the agency’s directorate of digital innovation. In addition to roles focusing on counterterrorism and the Middle East, he also held a leadership role at the C.I.A. school that trains analysts.
Once Congress approves funding for the broader malign influence center, the election threats team led by Mr. Wichman will be folded into the new group.
“While we work with Congress to get funding for the center, the intelligence community remains focused on addressing foreign malign influence,” Ms. de Haay said.
Chief on the agenda for the new executive is creating a common view of what constitutes malign election influence. In 2020, both Republicans and Democrats lamented that the intelligence agencies used different standards to judge Russian and Chinese efforts. Some analysts were reluctant to classify attempts by China to push its views as influence operations and suggested that the intelligence agencies needed a common standard.
Warnings this week in Britain and Canada about Chinese efforts to influence lawmakers in those countries have made questions about malign influence and election threats more acute.
Government intelligence analysts are still assessing how foreign threats are shifting ahead of this year’s midterm elections. But a senior intelligence official said that businesses were increasingly conducting campaigns for foreign nations, efforts “that include information manipulation and the laundering of disinformation narratives.”
The growth of those efforts, the senior official said, threatens to make the public more vulnerable to manipulation. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the operations of intelligence agencies, much of whose work is classified.
Before the announcement of Mr. Wichman’s appointment, some former intelligence officers and Capitol Hill aides had raised questions about whether the Biden administration had done enough to build up an election defense team.
Shelby Pierson was appointed as the election threats executive in 2019 after working on security issues surrounding the 2018 midterm elections. But because of President Donald J. Trump’s sensitivity to discussions of Russian interference in the elections, the job quickly became fraught.
Ms. Pierson stayed on through the beginning of the Biden administration until the end of her assignment. In September, she took a senior post at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.
But some congressional aides said that leaving the position empty for four months was a missed opportunity to quickly undo the damage to the office that occurred at the end of the Trump administration, when Ms. Pierson was blocked from briefing Congress.
Other former intelligence officers said that the leadership vacuum had caused much of the coordinating operation to go on hiatus. Without an election threats executive, sharing information among several intelligence agencies has proved difficult.
Part of the reason the job was not immediately filled was that intelligence officials had intended to expand the election threats executive’s team into a wider malign foreign influence center. While the annual defense policy bill that Mr. Trump signed into law in 2019 created such a center, Congress has not yet funded it.
The malign influence center was originally the idea of Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island, who is now the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. The center, he said this week, would address both foreign efforts to influence elections and “counter the full spectrum of these threats, which continue to evolve.”
It would focus on a range of countries trying to influence the United States, not just China and Russia.
While various intelligence agencies are trying to fight malign influence campaigns, Mr. Reed said there was not enough coordination across departments. As the midterm elections approach and other countries seek to use information warfare to undermine infrastructure, the economy and the military, it is critical to get the center running, he said.
Last year, Ms. Haines, the director of national intelligence, proposed reallocating positions to create a small center of up to 15 people without adding new jobs, congressional aides said.
But Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee raised questions about whether a new effort could legally be funded with such a maneuver, according to congressional aides. And the House Appropriations Committee posed a series of questions to Ms. Haines’s office.
“The initial D.N.I. request lacked important details on the operations, size and scope of the center, and I had questions that were not answered,” said Representative Betty McCollum, Democrat of Minnesota and the chairwoman of the House Appropriations Committee’s defense subcommittee.
For now, with the federal government operating under a stopgap spending bill, the new center cannot be created, and it is unclear if Congress will pass long-term spending bills before the end of the fiscal year in September. Ms. McCollum said she had included funding for the center in this year’s defense spending bill, but without agreement between the House and Senate, the legislation remains stalled.
“Clearly disinformation and misinformation is a serious national security threat,” she said, “and I will continue to work with D.N.I. to fund appropriate solutions.”
3. Meeting China’s hypersonic challenge
Hopefully defense against China's hypersonic missiles will have application to the Russian and north Korean systems as well (and we should expect the Iranians to develop the capability as well).
Meeting China’s hypersonic challenge
Country denies developing nuclear-armed missile, but U.S. must plan for it
OPINION:
Chinese President and Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping has declared his country will have the world’s strongest military by mid-century.
China is militarizing the South China Sea, has Taiwan in its crosshairs and is seeking to project power on a global scale both militarily and through its mercantilist debt-trap diplomacy. A revisionist power seeking to shape the world in its authoritarian image, Beijing represents a clear and present danger to the U.S. and our allies.
Last week, Chinese scientists announced their successful production of next-generation hypersonic weapons, which are equipped with infrared imaging technology. This breakthrough, heat-seeking capability would enable the Chinese military to expand its lethal targeting to include U.S. stealth aircraft and aircraft carriers.
Hypersonic missiles are a key component of China’s strategy to project power and deter the U.S. and its allies from countering its plans to establish a regional hegemony in East Asia.
China has denied developing a nuclear-armed hypersonic missile, but the U.S. must plan for this grim eventuality as well, since it would give China an alarming first-strike capability.
Expressing grave concern about China’s advances in hypersonic missiles in November 2021, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. John Hyten warned China could soon surpass U.S. military capability “if we don’t do something to change it.” Highlighting the “pace and trajectory” of China’s technological advances, Gen. Hyten noted that China had conducted hundreds of hypersonic missile tests in comparison to America’s nine.
Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley called the October Chinese hypersonic missile test “very close to a Sputnik moment,” reminiscent of the Soviet Union’s surprise advances in space at the height of the Cold War in 1958.
The U.S. is lagging dangerously behind China in the development of hypersonic missiles, with implications far beyond the military sphere. With military superiority, Chinese unfair trade practices would morph into even more sinister coercive measures. The Biden administration needs to take action with the greatest alacrity along three lines of operation.
First, China’s successes illustrate the critical importance of protecting our own technology from China’s ubiquitous espionage. Beijing is flooding the zone in the U.S. with traditional spying as well as exploiting its fellow-traveler businessmen who — by law — must share everything demanded of them with Chinese intelligence.
China targets the U.S. scientific community with its “Thousand Talents” recruiting program. There is an ongoing federal investigation targeting multiple scientists and researchers at leading universities who have allegedly been enriching their bank accounts by endangering intellectual property paid for by grant monies from the Pentagon.
Second, U.S. intelligence agencies must focus on our adversaries’ development and proliferation of hypersonic weapons. Key intelligence requirements would focus on how Mr. Xi and Russian President Vladimir Putin would plan to incorporate hypersonic missiles into their overall military strategy. China first tested its hypersonic missile in 2014 and Russia two years later. U.S. intelligence analysts must assiduously track the potential for nuclear-armed rogue states to acquire — or, in the case of North Korea, enhance — their own hypersonic arsenals.
Third, the Department of Defense, in partnership with the private sector, must develop a superior infrared hypersonic missile capability and adopt new countermeasures against the Russian and Chinese systems. The free market economy has always been our most powerful comparative advantage, which has enabled our military to stay a step ahead of brittle autocracies like Russia and China.
Yet the number of high technology companies partnering with the U.S. military has been steadily decreasing, the result of onerous regulations, lower profit margins and concerns about the government’s ability to protect intellectual property.
The Biden administration needs to build on the Trump administration’s success in developing a bipartisan consensus on countering, defending and deterring China, engaging the Congress on a broad agenda to cut red tape and speed technology acquisition; boost federal investment in private-sector research and development; and build up the technological prowess of the Defense Department’s technology acquisition workforce.
The key to outpacing China, as it was with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, is nurturing the most innovative and secure defense industrial base, one which can turbo-boost the U.S. military’s technological capacity. Now is not the time to cede the battlefield to Communist China and to Mr. Xi’s malign vision of a new world order.
• Daniel N. Hoffman is a retired clandestine services officer and former chief of station with the Central Intelligence Agency. His combined 30 years of government service included high-level overseas and domestic positions at the CIA. He has been a Fox News contributor since May 2018. Follow him on Twitter @DanielHoffmanDC.
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4. Russian Agents in Ukraine Are Trying to Create a Pretext for Invasion, Pentagon Says
So let's attack their strategy. (and a key point is to start by exposing it which Admiral Kirby is doing).
Russian Agents in Ukraine Are Trying to Create a Pretext for Invasion, Pentagon Says
“When there isn't an actual crisis to suit their needs, they'll make one up,” Kirby said
Russian agents in Ukraine are working on a false-flag operation to create a pretext that Moscow might use to invade the neighboring country, a Pentagon spokesman said Friday.
It could take the form of an attack on Russia or Russian-speaking people in Ukraine, John Kirby told reporters.
Kirby said the Pentagon has “indications that Russian influence actors are already starting...to fabricate Ukrainian provocations in both state and social media, to again try to justify in advance some sort of pretext for incursion.”
Kirby called the operation part of a playbook that Russia has drawn upon in the past, as when it invaded Ukraine in 2014 and illegally annexed Crimea. In December, White House officials said Moscow had “stepped up efforts” to portray the United States and Ukraine as instigators in the growing tensions.
“When there isn't an actual crisis to suit their needs, they'll make one up. And so we're watching for that,” he said.
Kirby said the operatives could be a blend of personnel from the military, intelligence, and security services, making it unclear to whom they report. He said past experience suggests that they were unlikely to be operating without the knowledge and approval of senior government officials.
Kirby declined to say more about the group, its location, or its capabilities.
Several media outlets cite an unnamed U.S. official as saying they are in eastern Ukraine. They are also trained in urban warfare and in using explosives for sabotage.
Earlier on Friday, a cyber attack took down several Ukrainian government websites, replacing them with messages telling visitors that their personal data was being uploaded and instructing them to be afraid. Kirby said it was too early to say whether this attack was the work of Russian agents or whether it is connected to a false flag operation. But he said it resembled previous Russian attacks.
Kirby said the Biden administration had decided to reveal its knowledge of the operatives’ existence to inform the American public and the world.
“To know that we know what's in this playbook and how it would potentially play out in Russian state and social media. So that if it does happen, it can be easily identified for what it is, which is a fabrication and a pretext,” he said.
The U.S. military currently has a few hundred troops in Ukraine, Kirby said. Fewer than 200 Florida National Guardsman are there on a rotational advise-and-assist mission. Some U.S. special forces are also training and advising Ukrainian units.
He declined to say what the Pentagon would do if Russia invaded Ukraine with these troops still on the ground.
The Biden administration believes there is still time for diplomacy with Russia to prevent an invasion of Ukraine.
“We do not believe that Mr. [Vladimir] Putin has made a final decision yet. So as long as that's the case, yes, we still believe there's time and space for diplomacy and we obviously want that to prevail,” Kirby said. “But if it doesn't, we're also, as an administration, ready to continue to look at options on the back end of that.”
5. Negotiate Like Putin
Conclusion:
Putin’s ‘Ukraine Gambit’ could be a case study in the Harvard negotiation course, and both he and President Biden could show the world that in today’s complex, 21st-century conflicts such as Ukraine, diplomacy – from a position of strength – is more necessary than ever. The stakes could not be higher.
Negotiate Like Putin
Dr. Kenneth Dekleva served as a Regional Medical Officer/Psychiatrist with the U.S. Dept. of State from 2002-2016, and is currently Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Director, Psychiatry-Medicine Integration, UT Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, TX; and a Senior Fellow at the George HW Bush Foundation for US-China Relations. The views expressed are entirely his own and do not represent the views of the U.S. Government, the U.S. Dept. of State, or UT Southwestern Medical Center.
OPINION — Russia’s President Vladimir Putin never attended Harvard Business School’s esteemed negotiation course, but in the current Ukraine crisis, he has performed brilliantly, and yes, he could teach Harvard’s finest professors a thing or two.
Putin’s masterful combination of long-term strategy, tactical gains, gray zone tactics, hybrid warfare, and management of the information space could serve as a case study in a Harvard seminar, on how to best negotiate from a position of strength while achieving one’s long-term strategic goals. There are no Russian words for BATNA (e.g. ‘best alternative to a negotiated agreement’) or ZOPA (e.g. ‘zone of possible agreement’), but understanding such concepts can be useful as President Biden and America’s NATO allies ponder next steps.
Disruptive adversaries, such as Putin, are often easily underestimated. Putin has described himself as “a specialist in human relations” – he was well-trained by the KGB – and is a ruthless and highly-strategic political (and yet rational) actor. Putin has been – for some time – fighting the ‘new’ Cold War with 21st-century tools and doctrine, utilizing a formidable array of talents, assets, gray zone, and whole of government approaches. These strategies involve uses of military, economic, political, diplomatic, cyber, informational, and intelligence tools to prevail in hybrid conflicts. The West’s response (regarding Ukraine) has been to shore up alliances such as NATO and the EU, trusting that this diplomatic show of strength, along with threats of severe economic sanctions (including SWIFT penalties) might somehow deter Putin. But sadly, following his 2014 land grab of Crimea, and subsequent conflict in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region, sanctions have done nothing to thwart Putin’s aggressive tactics and political behavior.
Given President Biden’s perceived – on the part of adversaries such as Putin, Xi, Kim and Iran’s Supreme Leader – political weakness, as well as liabilities on the part of the EU and NATO (note that Germany’s Chancellor Scholz is untested and new, and France’s President Macron faces re-election in 2022), Putin likely has little to fear from the EU or NATO. Due to the staggering amounts of Russian capital invested in British and European banks and other financial institutions, Putin realizes that SWIFT sanctions are a non-starter. He knows that he has the upper hand, and has already achieved a victory of sorts, especially following Biden’s recent comments that America and NATO will not send troops to the Ukraine; also, Biden has yet to nominate an American Ambassador to Ukraine. The lack of progress in the current US-Russia, NATO-Russia Council, and OSCE negotiations thereby comes as little surprise, with both sides expressing tough, hardened positions and Cold War style talking points.
Putin has publicly and repeatedly drawn his ‘red line’ – that Ukraine must never be allowed to join NATO. Therefore, his likely BATNA remains not necessarily an invasion of Ukraine, but a continuation of various hybrid/gray zone pressures as noted above, with a further demoralizing status quo. While Putin’s ‘red lines’ are backed by resolve and strength, he runs the risk of imperial overreach, in that a military invasion of Ukraine could lead to previously-neutral neighbors such as Sweden and Finland desiring to join NATO. This would be a huge loss for Putin and undo his significant advantage in the current conflict.
President Biden has emphasized American and NATO resolve in the current above negotiations. Alas, the negotiations appear to be deadlocked and stalled, with both sides staking out rigid, even ‘impossible’ negotiating positions. It is easy to be nihilistic, and to think that Putin will simply order an invasion of the Ukraine, regardless of the costs to Russia. Such a view misses the point and over-relies upon traditional Cold War negotiating tactics. And then there are those critics who believe that if President Trump were in office today, further negotiations might be possible and successful. Yes, Putin could even embrace ‘The Art of the Deal.’
President Biden might consider borrowing a page from President Trump, and turning the tables on Putin, by way of paradox and his own, Trump-like unpredictable move. Biden should appoint a high-level special envoy (preferably a former President, Vice-President, or Senator) in such a role, and it would show even greater resolve and bipartisanship if that person were a Republican. This would give Putin the respect and dignity that he and Russia so desperately crave in our new, complex post-Cold War disorder, and it would allow Putin a face-saving solution which would appeal to Russia’s elites and domestic audience, none of which (according to recent Russian polls) desire war. Putin could then pronounce in Russian, “ZOPA ni zhopa,” to borrow from the Harvard Business School’s lexicon — “a zone of possible agreement is not asinine.”
Putin’s ‘Ukraine Gambit’ could be a case study in the Harvard negotiation course, and both he and President Biden could show the world that in today’s complex, 21st-century conflicts such as Ukraine, diplomacy – from a position of strength – is more necessary than ever. The stakes could not be higher.
Read more expert-driven national security perspective, news and analysis in The Cipher Brief
Dr. Kenneth Dekleva served as a Regional Medical Officer/Psychiatrist with the U.S. Dept. of State from 2002-2016, and is currently Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Director, Psychiatry-Medicine Integration, UT Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, TX; and a Senior Fellow at the George HW Bush Foundation for US-China Relations. The views expressed are entirely his own and do not represent the views of the U.S. Government, the U.S. Dept. of State, or UT Southwestern Medical Center.
6. Russia, China and the Bid for Empire by Robert D. Kaplan
Rather than thinking about containment (contain what?), we should think about conducting a superior form of political warfare because that is what our adversaries are conducting.
Conclusion:
The problem now isn’t imperialism per se but the melding of imperialism with Leninist methods of control, which continue to define Russian and Chinese rule. Thus, the U.S. has no choice but to be a status quo power—that is, it need not defeat or even seriously undermine these two revisionist empires, but it must firmly hold the line against their advance. Ukraine needs not join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or the European Union, as long as it remains independent and democratic. Taiwan needs not declare independence, as long as it isn’t incorporated into China. These are unsatisfying positions, but they are moral in the sense that they represent both U.S. values and Americans’ wariness of armed overseas involvements.
...
Containment is a word nobody likes to say out loud. But it works. Remember especially that it was Richard Nixon’s Vietnam-era policy of détente and tactical maneuvering—rather than an attempt to seek all-out victory in the Cold War—that preceded Ronald Reagan’s successful Wilsonianism. The Soviet Union eventually collapsed of its own accord. We should keep that in mind, given that domestic tensions inside Russia and China, though more opaque than our own, aren’t to be underestimated and in fact help fuel their aggression.
Meanwhile, the American left should focus on where empire as an ideal truly endures, which isn’t in the West.
Russia, China and the Bid for Empire
The U.S. must hold the line against their imperial ambitions in Ukraine, Taiwan and elsewhere.
WSJ · by Robert D. Kaplan
The notion that we can play Russia off against China—as the Nixon administration played China off against the Soviet Union—is a fantasy. President Biden’s reward for giving up opposition to Russia’s Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to Germany has been the advance of nearly 100,000 Russian troops to the Ukrainian border area. National security adviser Henry Kissinger’s secret 1971 visit to Beijing occurred in the context of dramatic military tensions on the Chinese-Soviet frontier. China was in desperate need of U.S. help. Russia today has no such need.
True, the Chinese are making large-scale economic advances in formerly Soviet Central Asia, as well as providing security assistance to the Muslim republics there. But Russian President Vladimir Putin has calculated that China, a fellow authoritarian regime, isn’t a threat to his rule in the way the West is. (Indeed, Mr. Putin easily moved antiriot police into Kazakhstan, a place that the Russian empire settled with peasants from Russia and Ukraine in the 19th and early 20th centuries.) He has little need to line up with the West to balance against China.
Rather the reverse: Mr. Putin needs China to balance against the West. Since it is the West, in his view, that has helped install a hostile regime in Ukraine, whose border is less than 300 miles from Moscow, and would like to install a similarly hostile and democratic regime in Belarus, also relatively close to the Russian capital. What we see as potential or fledgling democratic states, Mr. Putin sees as vital parts of the former Soviet Union, a great power whose sprawling territory was based on czarist imperial conquests. While Ukraine was the birthplace of Kyivan Rus, it was also forcibly absorbed inside the czarist empire in the late 18th century, only to declare independence in 1918, before the Soviet conquest.
Mr. Putin’s goal isn’t only to restore the former Soviet Union in some form or other, but to establish a zone of influence throughout Central and Eastern Europe that approximates the borders of the former Warsaw Pact. Rather than direct rule through brotherly Communist parties—which proved too expensive and helped bring down the Soviet Union—Mr. Putin’s model is a form of mass Finlandization, in which the countries from Berlin to the east and to the southeast will know exactly what red lines not to cross in terms of Moscow’s interests.
A Pharaonic network of gas pipelines, intelligence operations, organized crime, disinformation and constant self-generated crises are the tools of Russian 21st-century imperialism. The crises of the moment are Ukraine, Belarus and Bosnia. In Belarus Middle Eastern refugees have been weaponized against Poland by President Alexander Lukashenko, a Putin lackey. In the western Balkans, Serb leader Milorad Dodik threatens to break up Bosnia-Herzegovina with backing from Russia and China. Russia’s aim in all of this is to insert itself into Europe as a power broker, the ultimate revenge against a region that in previous centuries generated many military invasions of the Russian heartland.
Imperialism throughout history has often originated from a deep well of insecurity. That is the case with Russia and China today. Just as Ukraine was for centuries part of the czarist and Soviet imperial heartland, Taiwan was a Chinese dynastic conquest until the 1894-95 Sino-Japanese War forced China to cede Taiwan to Japan. In Beijing’s view, restoring control of Taiwan to mainland China would right not only a Western depredation against a historic Chinese empire, the Qing Dynasty, but a Japanese depredation as well. Unlike Western countries, which are busy apologizing for their former conquests, the Chinese as well as the Russians take pride in their imperial legacies. Adm. Zheng He, an early Ming Dynasty explorer who sailed a vast armed fleet as far as the Middle East and East Africa, is a Chinese national hero.
If China and Russia didn’t take pride in empire, they wouldn’t be attempting to rule Taiwan and Ukraine today. For China, the return of Macau, the brutal suppression of Hong Kong and economic dominance over Outer Mongolia make Taiwan the only missing piece of its Middle Kingdom’s imperial geography. As for Tibet and Xinjiang (home to the Muslim Uyghur Turks), they represent colonial legacies of former Qing rule.
The problem now isn’t imperialism per se but the melding of imperialism with Leninist methods of control, which continue to define Russian and Chinese rule. Thus, the U.S. has no choice but to be a status quo power—that is, it need not defeat or even seriously undermine these two revisionist empires, but it must firmly hold the line against their advance. Ukraine needs not join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or the European Union, as long as it remains independent and democratic. Taiwan needs not declare independence, as long as it isn’t incorporated into China. These are unsatisfying positions, but they are moral in the sense that they represent both U.S. values and Americans’ wariness of armed overseas involvements.
Containment is a word nobody likes to say out loud. But it works. Remember especially that it was Richard Nixon’s Vietnam-era policy of détente and tactical maneuvering—rather than an attempt to seek all-out victory in the Cold War—that preceded Ronald Reagan’s successful Wilsonianism. The Soviet Union eventually collapsed of its own accord. We should keep that in mind, given that domestic tensions inside Russia and China, though more opaque than our own, aren’t to be underestimated and in fact help fuel their aggression.
Meanwhile, the American left should focus on where empire as an ideal truly endures, which isn’t in the West.
Mr. Kaplan holds a chair in geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and is author, most recently, of “The Good American: The Epic Life of Bob Gersony, the U.S. Government’s Greatest Humanitarian.”
WSJ · by Robert D. Kaplan
7. What the Thucydides Trap gets wrong about China
My favorite quote from Sir Lawrence Freedman: "Deterrence works. Until it doesn't."
Conclusion:
The risk of war in the Indo-Pacific region cannot usefully be understood as the result of an upstart power challenging the established global hegemon for supremacy. Issues of interest and alliances are as important as power balances, and all need to be watched carefully if conflict between the world’s preponderant forces are to be addressed and, hopefully, avoided.
What the Thucydides Trap gets wrong about China
Illustration by André Carrilho
The alarming possibility of a major conflict between the US and China has been framed as a likely consequence of a pattern of great power behaviour first identified by the fifth-century BCE historian Thucydides. In his study of the Peloponnesian War, the Greek wrote: “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.” This argument is now most associated with the Harvard academic Graham Allison, who claims to have identified 16 instances in which a dominant power has sought to suppress an emerging rival before they became too strong. He notes, disconcertingly, that 12 of these ended in war.
Allison first presented his thesis of the “Thucydides Trap” in the Atlantic in 2015, and developed it in a book, Destined for War, in 2017. Since then, Allison’s argument that the relationship between the US and China is growing increasingly volatile has gained even more credibility with tensions over trade, the South China Sea and Taiwan.
But Allison’s notion of the Thucydides Trap – the tendency towards war when a rising power threatens to displace an existing one – fails to address the risks involved in conflict and the reasons why wars occur. The story told by Thucydides is much more complicated than the “Trap” suggests. The notion of inevitable conflict between Athens and Sparta elides the fact that the Athenian leader Pericles made poor strategic calls. Different decisions would have avoided war.
These choices were largely about the cohesion of the respective Athenian and Spartan alliances, and the possibility of a smaller state defecting because it did not feel protected. A major difference now is that there are asymmetrical alliances: China is far more isolated geopolitically than the US.
If lessons are to be drawn from past power struggles the most relevant among them is the Cold War. The avoidance of armed conflict between the US and the Soviet Union was to a great extent owing to the presence of nuclear weapons. This is a threat that both Beijing and Washington must consider and in that respect, the Cold War is a better comparison than the rivalries between Portugal and Spain in the 15th century or those between England and the Dutch Republic in the 17th.
China is also involved in a complex set of power relationships. Russia was once China’s senior partner; now it is China that is the stronger. Fifty years ago they almost came to blows; now they enjoy an uneasy cordiality. Meanwhile, there has been tension on China’s border with India (another rising power?), while in 2014, the Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe noted disturbing similarities between Europe in 1914 and his country’s dispute with China over the Senkaku Islands (claimed by China as the Diaoyu Islands). China must consider possible conflicts with all the major players in the region, and not just the US. To Beijing’s consternation new security pacts have emerged, such as the Quad, consisting of the US, Australia, Japan and India, and the Aukus agreement between Australia, the UK and the US.
As China has become more powerful it has grown more assertive, which is why its neighbours have become anxious about its intentions. But contrary to the logic of the Thucydides Trap, in the past China went to war –with Korea in 1950, India in 1962, and Vietnam in 1979 – when it was in a position of weakness, not strength. Its military and economic power is now second only to the US, but that also means China has much more to lose in any kind of protracted, multi-front conflict.
The “Trap” argument is also undermined when you consider the view held by many experts that China’s power may have already peaked. The nation is facing a series of system problems that may halt its rise, including an unbalanced economy, an ageing population, environmental degradation and political dysfunction resulting from President Xi Jinping’s authoritarian turn. Indeed, recent war scares start from the assumption that the leadership in Beijing might want to invade Taiwan before China’s power wanes.
The risk of war in the Indo-Pacific region cannot usefully be understood as the result of an upstart power challenging the established global hegemon for supremacy. Issues of interest and alliances are as important as power balances, and all need to be watched carefully if conflict between the world’s preponderant forces are to be addressed and, hopefully, avoided.
8. China Is Watching Ukraine With a Lot of Interest
And Russia is watching Taiwan with a lot of interest. And north Korea and Iran are watching both Ukraine and Taiwan and asking themselves how they can exploit either or both.
Conclusion:
What can be said with greater certainty is that Ukraine and Taiwan both show how easily U.S. weakness—or even the mere perception of weakness—could unravel the strained networks and alliances that support the American world order and usher in a new era of global conflict and instability. “Is Ukraine the same as Taiwan? No, of course they are not the same situation,” Pletka, of the American Enterprise Institute, said. “But in terms of the U.S.’s willingness to become entangled, I think there you see the very same signals.” The Putins and Xis of the world are probing for those weaknesses, watching the results, and calculating their next move.
China Is Watching Ukraine With a Lot of Interest
Biden’s handling of Putin may tell Xi Jinping how resolutely the U.S. would defend Taiwan.
As Joe Biden confronts Vladimir Putin about Russia’s military buildup along its border with Ukraine, another world leader is probably watching with keen interest. China’s Xi Jinping, too, has a geopolitical grievance in his neighborhood—in his case over Taiwan, the microchip-rich island that Beijing insists is and always should be part of China. Like Putin, who is eager to bring Ukraine back under Moscow’s control, Xi worries that a former chunk of his country’s empire is growing closer with the United States and its allies. How Xi interprets (or worse, misinterprets) the outcome of the Ukraine standoff could influence whether and how China tries to reunify with Taiwan, and thus has implications for the security and stability of East Asia.
That makes the Ukraine crisis a crucial test of American global power. Four years of Donald Trump’s “America First” chaos abroad, combined with political and social polarization and a failed response to the coronavirus pandemic at home, have fueled the perception around the world that America is a superpower on its last legs—one too divided, overstretched, and just plain weary to sustain its far-flung commitments. This narrative, which Biden’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan only reinforced, seems to have taken hold within the Chinese leadership and has become a regular theme of official propaganda. As Xi, Putin, and other autocrats intensify their efforts to roll back American power, the U.S. is facing the stiffest challenge to its global primacy since the fall of the Soviet Union.
The fate of Ukraine has become intimately entangled in this renewed big-power competition. If Biden is firm, deft, and a little lucky, a series of talks this week among Russia, the U.S., and its allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization will lead to a compromise and avoid a Russian invasion of Ukraine. Yet a stalemate persists over Ukraine’s potential membership in NATO—which Putin desperately wishes to prevent. At stake is the balance of power between the U.S. and Russia in Eastern Europe. The outcome, though, could reverberate well beyond the region, and well into the future, affecting whether American power will remain strong enough to maintain peace and advance democracy—or whether the world’s autocracies will claw back clout that they lost decades ago.
Leaders such as Putin and Xi may see an opportunity. “The problem for Biden is that their view is that they should test him at all times, and they are. And he has so far not really passed those tests with any distinction,” Danielle Pletka, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told me. “This is a very important period.”
The Taiwan Strait, which separates the island from the mainland, has been a jittery potential hot spot for seven decades, but tensions there have ramped up significantly in the past two years. Xi has routinely sent squadrons of jets buzzing near Taiwan and held military exercises dangerously close to the island in an apparent attempt to harass and intimidate the democratic government in Taipei. Xi repeatedly talks of eventual peaceful unification, but his aggressive stance has raised fears in Taiwan and around the region that he is pondering an invasion to reclaim the wayward province.
Xi may believe that Taiwan is drifting in a direction harmful to China’s national interests, just as Ukraine has strayed ever further from Moscow’s orbit. Taiwan’s independent-minded president, Tsai Ing-wen, has tried to reduce the economy’s reliance on China and strengthen ties to the U.S. and other countries. Washington, too, has sought closer links. Officially, the U.S. still upholds the “one China” principle and does not formally recognize the Taipei government. But it’s not hard to discern why Xi might think otherwise. The Trump administration sent a Cabinet member to Taipei in 2020, the highest-level American official dispatched there for more than four decades. Biden invited Taiwan to his Summit for Democracy in December as if it were any other country.
Xi, explains Shelley Rigger, a Taiwan expert at Davidson College in North Carolina, is trying to determine if Washington is undergoing a shift in policy, “to viewing Taiwan as a kind of essential strategic asset for preventing or suppressing the rise of China. That’s what I think the Chinese are really worried about.”
In light of all this, Xi will be scrutinizing the situation in Ukraine for useful intelligence about which tools Biden can and ultimately will employ to pressure Russia to back off, how much he is willing to give up in a potential compromise with Putin, and how effectively the U.S. president works with allies and even his own diplomats. China’s leader, in other words, will be looking to measure the level of American resolve. Xi and other leaders who oppose U.S. interests “can take stock of how Mr. Biden and his colleagues are functioning, operating; how do they handle crises,” Rupert Hammond-Chambers, the president of the U.S.-Taiwan Business Council, told me. “These are things they are still working through in regard to a relatively new administration in Washington.”
Yet Xi can learn only so much from what Biden does about Ukraine. To assume that the U.S. response to crises over Taiwan and Ukraine will be comparable would be wrong—and even dangerous. Although Biden has ruled out unilaterally sending U.S. troops to defend the Eastern European country, Washington has deliberately left its position on military intervention on behalf of Taiwan unclear. The long-standing policy of “strategic ambiguity” on this point is designed as a deterrent to Chinese military action. Xi would have to assume that invading Taiwan could embroil him in a war with the United States. Also, the U.S. arguably has more reasons to fight for Taiwan than for Ukraine. As a link in the alliance system that forms the backbone of U.S. power in the Pacific, as well as within crucial supply chains for semiconductors and other high-tech components, Taiwan may be more essential to American national interests. In testimony for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in December, Assistant Defense Secretary Ely Ratner described Taiwan as “anchoring a network of U.S. allies and partners that is critical to the region’s security and critical to the defense of vital U.S. interests in the Indo-Pacific.”
The U.S. strategic positions in Europe and Asia are different too. Biden’s choices about Ukraine could be constrained by NATO and the European Union. His response to Putin may go only as far as his European colleagues are willing to follow. NATO has no equivalent in Asia, but in certain respects, that may give Washington greater freedom of action. And on Taiwan, the U.S. might find more support from regional allies for a strong stance. In July, Tarō Asō, then Japan’s deputy prime minister, suggested that his government would join the U.S. in defending Taiwan if the island was attacked by China. “It would not be too much to say that it could relate to a survival-threatening situation” for Japan, he said. How much of a shift in Tokyo’s policy such remarks entail is debatable. What’s clear is that Japan, the other major power in East Asia, views Taiwan’s safety as a national interest, and that, too, could act as a deterrent to Xi.
For Xi, a cross-strait strike might also be a terrible risk. Although a Russian invasion of Ukraine may not be a guaranteed success, Putin has likely calculated that he has a good shot at overrunning his neighbor. A Chinese military assault across the heavily fortified Taiwan Strait, by contrast, could easily prove bloody, protracted, and therefore embarrassing—and thus could be a threat to Xi’s standing and possibly that of the Communist regime. Perhaps Xi and Putin could coordinate their attacks, or Beijing could take advantage of the distraction of a European war to make a grab for Taiwan. But Hammond-Chambers, of the U.S.-Taiwan Business Council, makes a compelling argument against such a scenario. “China is a rising power and, in their view, they have more time than less time” to resolve the Taiwan issue, he said. “I don’t put stock in the notion that China would attach its timeline to Moscow’s on Taiwan. I don’t see the Chinese outsourcing their interests. It’s not the way they function.”
Shelley Rigger also figures that Chinese leaders aren’t yet ready to use force. “The balance of evidence and logic suggests that their goal today, as for the past 70 years, has been deterring Taiwan independence more than trying to compel unification,” she said.
Predicting what dictators will do is a thankless task, however. Perhaps Xi could calculate that trying to forcibly unify Taiwan with the mainland would serve his personal political interests; if successful, he would solidify his position and etch his name in the annals of Chinese Communist history. Or he could miscalculate and assume that Biden’s struggles will keep the U.S. sidelined—a potentially disastrous judgment made more likely by the ever more autocratic political environment in Beijing, which could easily lead Xi’s advisers to tell him what they think he wants to hear.
What can be said with greater certainty is that Ukraine and Taiwan both show how easily U.S. weakness—or even the mere perception of weakness—could unravel the strained networks and alliances that support the American world order and usher in a new era of global conflict and instability. “Is Ukraine the same as Taiwan? No, of course they are not the same situation,” Pletka, of the American Enterprise Institute, said. “But in terms of the U.S.’s willingness to become entangled, I think there you see the very same signals.” The Putins and Xis of the world are probing for those weaknesses, watching the results, and calculating their next move.
9. Iran says 25-year China agreement enters implementation stage
An axis.....
Iran says 25-year China agreement enters implementation stage
The agreement was signed last year and includes economic, military and security cooperation.
Iran's then-Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and Chinese counterpart Wang Yi sign a 25-year cooperation agreement in Tehran last year [Majid Asgaripour/West Asia News Agency via Reuters]
Published On 15 Jan 202215 Jan 2022
Tehran, Iran – A 25-year comprehensive cooperation agreement signed between Iran and China last year has now entered the implementation stage, according to Iran’s foreign minister.
Hossein Amirabdollahian, in his first visit to China as foreign minister, announced the news late Friday after a meeting with his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi.
“While preparing for the visit to China, we had made preparations to be able to mark today as the starting day of implementing the comprehensive agreement between the two countries,” Amirabdollahian said, but he did not announce any specific projects or agreements to mark the occasion.
Signed in Tehran in March 2021 when former President Hassan Rouhani was in office, the “strategic accord” entails economic, military and security cooperation, even as both countries are under different levels of United States sanctions.
Among other things, China has been purchasing Iranian oil – with a discount – in defiance of the sanctions over the past three years. Neither country discloses exact details.
During his visit, Amirabdollahian also delivered a letter by President Ebrahim Raisi for President Xi Jinping, which he said contained an “important message” for Raisi’s administration.
He did not elaborate on the contents, but the Raisi administration has repeatedly emphasised an “Asia-centric” foreign policy that includes China as an important factor.
Amirabdollahian’s visit came amid a flurry of meetings in Wuxi, Jiangsu. The foreign minister landed there shortly after China’s Yi held talks with the secretary general of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), and the foreign ministers of four of its member countries – Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman and Bahrain – in addition to the Turkish foreign minister.
Vienna nuclear talks
Continuing talks in Vienna aimed at restoring Iran’s 2015 nuclear deal with world powers were also high on the agenda during the Iranian foreign minister’s visit.
After the meeting, Amirabollahian told reporters Iran is ready to achieve an agreement in the Austrian capital in the shortest time, a feat that will be made possible with the support of China and Russia.
A readout of the meeting published by Iran’s foreign ministry quoted Wang Yi as saying China supports Iran’s “logical” position in the Vienna talks.
“We hope that the Western parties also continue the negotiations in Vienna with a realistic view aimed at achieving an agreement that will also see the interests of the Iranian people secured,” he said.
The foreign minister criticised the Western parties – the US, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom – for what he called their lack of “initiative” in the talks.
“They say we’re worried and we’re in a hurry but their lack of practical initiative shows there is a contrast between their rhetoric and action,” he said.
The eighth – and presumably final – round of the intensive talks has been continuing in Vienna since last month as the Western parties warn mere weeks are left to reach an agreement because of Iran’s nuclear advancements.
The heads of the negotiating delegations agreed on Friday to head back to their capitals for two days for consultations, but the talks are not on pause as the expert working groups continue to hold sessions.
The US imposed its harsh sanctions on Iran from 2018 when it unilaterally abandoned the nuclear deal. Iran has since significantly ramped up its nuclear programme, but says it is strictly peaceful.
Source: Al Jazeera
10. US needs more Asians to avoid demographic death
The numbers do not look good.
In the long term, moreover, Asian immigrants will not reverse the long-term demographic decline. The immigration of skilled adults only plugs the hole left by the fertility decline of the previous generation.
The Asian-American total fertility rate is below the national average (at 1.53 for Asian-Americans in 2018 vs 1.72 for all Americans).
For the time being, the best that we can do is to buy time. But time is well worth buying. If America loses the Fourth Industrial Revolution to China, our standard of living and our capacity to recuperate will be severely, perhaps permanently impaired, as I argued in a December 2021 monograph for the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life.
Skilled immigration will give us a competitive edge against China, and the wherewithal to address our fundamental problems. It may not be the best solution, but it is the best that public policy can devise under adverse circumstances.
US needs more Asians to avoid demographic death
A skills-based immigration system could halt the demographic winter that has descended on America
Now that Elon Musk has tweeted that “population collapse is potentially the greatest risk to the future of civilization,” it must be true. America’s total fertility rate fell in 2020 to only 1.67 births per female, the lowest in history, and well below the replacement level of 2.1.
Ten years ago, when I published , the United States still made babies at the replacement rate, though (as I noted) this depended on high fertility among two groups of Americans: Evangelical Christians and Hispanics.
Now demographic winter has descended on America, and there is no obvious path to recovery. The only medium-term solution lies in the immigration of skilled adults, and the only two prospective sources of large-scale immigration of skilled adults are China and India.
Civilizations die because they want to. Nations that live for the present and eschew a vision of their future do not take the trouble to raise children. Today’s demographic decline has precedents in the hollowing-out of Hellenistic Greece after the Alexandrian conquests, and the decline of Rome several centuries later.
In the modern era, religious commitment has been the strongest predictor of the desire to bring future generations into the world; other writers, notably the British demographer , have made parallel arguments.
What demographers call the great fertility transition occurred with urbanization and the end of child labor. In agricultural societies and early modern industry, children were cheap labor and considered (as in wrongful death lawsuits) a resource with a definable monetary value.
Once national pension systems replaced family care for the aged, and children no longer were expected to work until early adulthood, children offered spiritual rather than monetary value.
Now we have another 10 years’ worth of data, and they bear out my 2011 thesis: the decline in American fertility tracks (and in fact is predicted by) the decline in religious commitment among Americans. This has deep implications for public policy. If religious faith is the most important determinant of fertility, public policy can have only a modest impact on birth rates.
The annual survey on American attitudes towards religion includes the question: “How important would you say religion is in your own life – very important, fairly important, or not very important?”
As shown in the above chart, the US Total Fertility Rate tracks the percentage who answered “very important” closely. The link between fertility and faith passes all the tests for statistical robustness.
Where data are available, we observe a close relationship between religious commitment and fertility. In a May 2021 survey, the reported: “Orthodox Jewish adults report having an average of 3.3 children, while non-Orthodox Jews have an average of 1.4 children. Orthodox Jews also are five years younger, on average, when they give birth to their first child (23.6 vs 28.6 among non-Orthodox Jews).”
Data for American Christians are less clear-cut. of the University of Oklahoma reported in 2020 that fertility fell to 2.3 children in 2016 from 2.7 children in 1972. The rate of church attendance had a small positive correlation with fertility, they concluded, but the fertility of conservative Protestants declined regardless of the rate of church attendance.
Arguably, other factors drove American fertility down. Immigration (including illegal) from Latin America dropped off sharply after the 2008 financial crisis, and Hispanics were disproportionate contributors to fertility.
The Hispanic birth rate dropped from 97.4 births per 1,000 women in 2007 to 65.3 births per 1,000 women in 2019, a faster rate of decline than among the non-Hispanic population. That may have to do with economic factors, but it could also reflect the assimilation of Hispanics into mainstream American culture. We do not have enough evidence to judge.
Why has religious commitment declined? Part of the blame may lie with religious leadership.
The Gallup data for American confidence in organized religion show a fall by about half since 1973 in the proportion of respondents who have “quite a lot” or “a great deal” of confidence in religious institutions.
Remarkably, the decline in religious commitment is overwhelmingly a Protestant phenomenon, according to the Gallup data. Since the early 1950s, the proportion of Americans who identify as Catholic has remained in the mid-20% range, while the proportion of Protestants has collapsed by about half.
The percentage who identify with no religion rose from around zero in the early 1950s to 20% in 2020. Catholic numbers, to be sure, are supported by immigration from mainly Catholic countries.
The fall in religious affiliation is mainly a Protestant phenomenon, but the decline in fertility is similar across denominations. Sociologist , in a July 2021 study for Crisis magazine, concluded “in the United States, the facts show sharp drops in fertility among Catholic women overall, and among those who have ever been married, similar to what we find among Americans as a whole.”
The great wave of secularization came to America, the country “with the spirit of a church,” somewhat later than it did to the rest of the industrial world and had the same impact on fertility. Secular trends of this kind are difficult to reverse (but not impossible: Russia’s total fertility rate rose from a 1999 low of 1.16 to an estimated 1.83 in 2020).
Among the high-income countries only Israel, with a total fertility rate (TFR) just over 3 – almost double its peer nation average – has a fertility rate above replacement. Excluding the highly religious Haredi portion of the Israeli population, the fertility rate is still 2.6, far higher than the rest of the industrial world.
Israel is the exception that proves the rule. By Western standards, Israel is the most religious among the high-income nations. Up to 98% of Jewish Israelis “always” place a mezuzah (a small box containing hand-written Bible verses) on their door, 92% circumcise their male children, 70% maintain Jewish dietary laws at home, 70% fast on Yom Kippur and 78% take part in a Passover Seder, according to .
A Jew’s decision to live in Israel with all the attendant risks and obligations (including universal military service) by itself implies a high degree of faith even among the professedly secular.
Germany has an extremely low fertility rate but has had considerable success in attracting skilled or semi-skilled immigrants. As of 2018, 4.8 million citizens of other European Union countries had moved to Germany, almost 10% of the country’s 49 million citizens of working age (20 to 64 years old).
But this trend cannot continue for long because the fertility rate of the countries that sent migrants to Germany (Poland, Romania, Italy, Spain and so forth) is even lower than Germany’s.
Germany’s demographic profile appears dire, but it has postponed the inevitable aging crisis through skilled immigration. Italy’s situation seems hopeless; its population is aging faster than its peers and it is losing skilled working-age adults rather than importing them.
Immigrants to Italy come overwhelmingly from Africa and the Middle East and cannot replace the diminishing number of productive adults.
The position of the United States is somewhat better than the high-income country average for projected old-age dependency (China’s much-discussed demographic problem is about the same as the high-income average). But the United States is headed in the same direction as Germany and China.
What should the United States do about this? Declining fertility is a cultural and confessional phenomenon and not directly susceptible to government initiatives. There are only three options open to public policy:
- Encourage a higher fertility rate through economic incentives;
- Attempt to reverse the long-term decline in productivity growth to allow a smaller base of taxpayers to support a larger proportion of retirees;
- Encourage the immigration of working-age adults who contribute more to the social insurance system than they take from it.
The first option is desirable but likely to have a small effect. The second and third options are inseparable. Reversing the long-term decline of labor productivity requires the reconstruction of America’s depleted manufacturing sector, and that in return requires a much larger number of engineers than American universities presently produce.
The United States graduates only 40,000 mechanical engineers each year, about the same as Germany. Rebuilding American industry will require skilled immigrants.
Like most industrial countries, the United States confronts a sharp drop-off in labor force growth and rapid aging of the adult population. Economic incentives for childbearing can mitigate, but not reverse, the infertility trend.
We might adopt a sliding scale of Social Security and Medicare deductions to the benefit of large families (childless people are “free riders” on the social insurance system because they do not invest in the next generation of prospective contributors), and increase the per-child income tax deduction. But bringing children into the world ceased to be an economic decision generations ago; today it is an act of faith, and the tide of faith is receding.
The only medium-term mitigation of demographic decline can come through immigration, specifically the immigration of skilled individuals who are likely to contribute more to the economy than they cost.
Estimates of the cost of illegal immigration to the US range from (Heritage Foundation) to the figure cited by former President Trump. But any negative number is unacceptable; immigration policy must aim for a positive economic contribution.
There are only two sources of large numbers of skilled working-age adults, namely China and India. Asian Americans numbered 19.9 million in the 2020 Census, including 4.1 million Chinese, 4 million Indians and 1.5 million Koreans.
By any measure, Asian Americans are successful. A total of 32.4% of Asian American households earn in excess of $100,000 a year, compared to 20.1% of all American households. Up to 50% of Asian-Americans hold a bachelor’s degree, compared with 42% of the total population.
America’s predicament calls for a radical revision of US immigration policy to favor skilled adults, in emulation of Australian and Canadian standards. China in 2015 awarded 1.2 million bachelor’s degrees in science and engineering, according to the National Science Foundation, six times the number in the United States, and the absolute number of Chinese graduates as well as the ratio of Chinese to American graduates have grown since then.
We complain about China’s political system, but there is nothing the United States can do to change it. The majority of China’s 1.4 billion people concern themselves with their own conditions of life, and per capita income in China rose tenfold from 1995 to 2020.
But among China’s 1.4 billion people are many tens of millions who detest the authoritarian regime and would prefer to raise their children in the United States. And China’s democrats are disproportionately educated and enterprising adults of young working age.
We cannot export democracy to China, but we can import millions of its democratic aspirants. Numerous times in history, a great migration of human capital has caused periods of extraordinary economic growth and a shift in relative power relations.
Examples include the expulsion of the Jews from Spain and Portugal at the end of the 15th century, which contributed to Holland’s rise as an economic and military power; the migration of Huguenots to England and Prussia after the 1685 revocation of the Edict of Nantes; the German migration to America’s Midwest after the failed 1848 revolution; and the migration to the United States of thousands of Europe’s best scientists before and during World War II.
Among all the comparisons of American and Chinese economic strength, we should keep in mind that China cannot make Americans into Chinese, but America can make Chinese into Americans.
The struggle for predominance in this century will depend not on any particular technology or group of technologies, but on human capital. Our capacity to integrate human capital is our only natural advantage and it may prove to be our decisive strength.
Early immigrants arriving in the US. Photo: WikiCommons
Short-term fix
The immigration policy outlined above is not the best solution to America’s economic problems, nor indeed is it a solution in the long term. The optimal solution is to reverse America’s cultural decline of the past two generations, but that is beyond the competence of public policy.
An inspirational leader might summon Americans to a sense of national purpose, as John F Kennedy did with the Apollo program or Ronald Reagan with the Strategic Defense Initiatives, and elicit the better angels of our nature. We do not know who such a leader might be.
In the meantime, we must play the hand that we were dealt.
The arrival of a large number of Chinese, Indian or other skilled immigrants would produce a degree of social friction that should not be minimized. Highly-qualified immigrants make a net contribution to society (they add more economic value and pay more taxes than they cost); in the large, their contributions represent a net benefit to other Americans.
But economic life is not always lived in the large. Locally, their presence would set a higher bar for tertiary education and workforce advancement for many other Americans. Some exacerbation of social tensions would be inevitable.
In the long term, moreover, Asian immigrants will not reverse the long-term demographic decline. The immigration of skilled adults only plugs the hole left by the fertility decline of the previous generation.
The Asian-American total fertility rate is below the national average (at 1.53 for Asian-Americans in 2018 vs 1.72 for all Americans).
For the time being, the best that we can do is to buy time. But time is well worth buying. If America loses the Fourth Industrial Revolution to China, our standard of living and our capacity to recuperate will be severely, perhaps permanently impaired, as I argued in a December 2021 monograph for the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life.
Skilled immigration will give us a competitive edge against China, and the wherewithal to address our fundamental problems. It may not be the best solution, but it is the best that public policy can devise under adverse circumstances.
This story first appeared on The American Mind website and is republished with permission. To see the original, click here.
11. Reed aims for fresh push to confirm Biden’s Pentagon nominees
Question: Do Senate rules hinder the national security process?
Reed aims for fresh push to confirm Biden’s Pentagon nominees
He is expected to ask Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., to expend floor time to hold procedural votes to install senior Pentagon officials, in the face of delay tactics from some Republicans. The vacancies at the Pentagon would get new attention amid fresh tensions with Russia and the military’s efforts to keep pace with China technologically.
The nominations have been held up in part due to Republican opposition, an obstacle that remains. Republican Sens. Josh Hawley, of Missouri, and Ted Cruz, of Texas, indicated Thursday they will continue to force procedural votes on Biden nominees to the Pentagon and State Department ― public stands meant to highlight their criticism of Biden’s foreign policy.
The delay is affecting nine nominees who have cleared the Senate Armed Services Committee and are awaiting a vote. Few State Department and Pentagon nominees have come to the Senate floor in recent weeks as the chamber’s leadership has attempted to pass key parts of Biden’s domestic agenda.
Hours before Schumer announced Thursday night the Senate will vote Tuesday on voting rights legislation, Reed said he would lobby for the Senate to turn to nominees next.
“What we want to do ... if we have to, is bring people to the floor for votes,” Reed told Defense News. “Recognizing that voting rights is the most critical issue, but once that has been resolved, I think we’re going to ask if we can get access to the floor and then start moving these [nominees].”
Before the holiday break, Cruz struck a deal with Schumer to use the unanimous consent process to confirm 32 noncontroversial ambassadors and senior State Department officials. In exchange, the Senate held a vote Thursday on Cruz’s bill to levy sanctions aimed at Nord Stream 2, a system of gas pipelines from Russia to Europe.
After the Senate voted down the bill, Cruz told reporters he will continue to call for votes on other unspecified nominees until Democrats “stop surrendering to Russia.”
“There are I believe roughly 10 holds in place right now,” Cruz said. “I would certainly anticipate more will be forthcoming as additional nominations come down the pike. But I am also very happy to continue lifting holds in exchange for progress stopping Russia’s aggression.”
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The Senate confirmed President Joe Biden’s pick for ambassador to NATO, Julianne Smith, by a voice vote Thursday after Sen. Josh Hawley removed his objection to the nomination.
Whether similar deals will be made to clear a path for other nominees is not immediately clear.
Hawley, who has said he will maintain his own holds until Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and other top administration officials resign over the chaotic exit from Afghanistan, said Thursday he and Reed had some tentative discussions to resolve his holds.
“My commitment remains that I want to get some accountability on the Afghanistan situation and, until we can do that, then I’m going to make us vote on senior leadership positions,” Hawley said.
Asked if the conversations were aimed at a compromise, Reed said the recently passed defense policy bill already establishes a commission to study the Afghanistan war ― and indicated he disagrees with Hawley’s approach.
“I’ve talked to Josh, and he’s a very thoughtful member, a very positive contributor to the committee, but I just don’t think we can treat national security, DoD nominees, as trading bait for other things, even if they have a tinge of national security,” Reed said.
Of 64 Pentagon positions that require Senate confirmation, the Senate has confirmed 25 of Biden’s nominees, 21 are waiting for action in the Senate and three nominees have been announced but not formally nominated. No nominee has been announced for eight open positions, including the deputy undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment.
Under the Trump administration, the White House expressed frustration about the Senate’s slow pace of confirming nominees to fill key roles. Democrats argue those delays were about individual nominees and their qualifications, rather than blanket holds.
“That did not happen during the Trump administration. There were no wholesale holds,” said Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., and senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Democrats and Republicans have decried the delays as harmful to national security.
“It’s interesting: The same people who are complaining about our posture vis a vis Russia and other threats are the same people who are holding up our ability to have people in place who can do the job,” Shaheen said. “I think it’s unfortunate, because those [nominees] are the people we need to protect American interests around the world.”
Joe Gould is senior Pentagon reporter for Defense News, covering the intersection of national security policy, politics and the defense industry.
12. Britain’s Security Agency MI5 Warns Lawmakers of China’s Political Interference
Britain’s Security Agency MI5 Warns Lawmakers of China’s Political Interference
An unusual alert by the agency named a Chinese lawyer who was “knowingly engaged in political interference activities” on behalf of Beijing in the U.K. Parliament.
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People walking by the River Thames, with the Elizabeth Tower, known as Big Ben, and the Houses of Parliament, in the backdrop in London.Credit...Matt Dunham/Associated Press
Jan. 13, 2022
LONDON — Britain’s domestic security agency, MI5, sent an unusual alert on Thursday to lawmakers warning that an agent of the Chinese government was actively working to subvert the political processes of Parliament.
The existence of the alert, revealed by lawmakers in Britain’s House of Commons, led some outspoken critics of the Chinese government to demand a response from Britain’s Conservative government on its plans to combat political interference.
This is the sort of interference “we now anticipate and expect from China,” said Tobias Ellwood, a Conservative lawmaker. “But the fact that it has happened to this Parliament — there must be a sense of urgency from this government.”
In response, China has imposed sanctions on several British lawmakers and groups for their public criticisms of the government, including their repression of Uighurs, a Muslim minority.
Top officials have in the past cited China’s political reach as a concern. Richard Moore, chief of MI6, the country’s foreign intelligence service, said in a speech in November that the agency’s “single greatest priority” was adapting to a world where China’s power is rising. He warned that Chinese intelligence services were seeking to conduct “large scale espionage operations” against Britain and its allies.
The notice from MI5 was published by several British news media outlets and its authenticity was confirmed by the Office of the Speaker of Parliament. It warned that a woman identified as Christine Ching Kui Lee had “acted covertly” through the United Front Work Department, a branch of the Chinese Communist Party devoted to furthering the government’s agenda in the world. The branch had sought to “cultivate relationships with influential figures in order to ensure the U.K. political landscape is favorable to the C.C.P’s agenda,” the notice said.
Ms. Lee, a lawyer, was also openly affiliated with two other groups, the China Overseas Friendship Association and the British-Chinese Project, the statement said, using the cover of representing the British Chinese community to obscure her activities on the behalf of the Chinese government.
Ms. Lee had been involved in the “facilitation of financial donations to political parties,” lawmakers and potential candidates for public office in Britain and to “political entities” on behalf of foreign nationals, the statement said. She had “extensive engagement with individuals across the U.K. political spectrum,” and she had been involved in informal cross-party groups run by lawmakers known as All-Party Parliamentary Groups, the statement added.
Those contacted by Ms. Lee, the notice cautioned, should be “mindful of her affiliation with the Chinese state and remit to advance the C.C.P.’ s agenda in U.K. politics.”
In its records on political funding, Britain’s Electoral Commission listed a series of donations from Christine Lee & Co to support the office of an opposition Labour Party lawmaker, Barry Gardiner.
Mr. Gardiner said in a statement on Thursday that he had liaised for a number of years with British security services and that they had “been made fully aware by me, of her engagement with my office and the donations she made to fund researchers in my office in the past.”
He added that Ms. Lee had no role in either the appointment or management of those researchers, that she had ceased funding any workers in his office in June 2020. He had not benefited personally from those donations, he said.
Ms. Lee’s son was working in his office but resigned Thursday, the statement said. Security services had advised him that “they have no intelligence that shows he was aware of, or complicit in, his mother’s illegal activity.”
Efforts to reach Ms. Lee on Thursday were unsuccessful.
“I know it will be deeply concerning to many that an individual who has knowingly engaged in political interference activities on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party has targeted” lawmakers, Priti Patel, Britain’s home secretary, said in a statement.
Nevertheless, she added, the revelation was a sign of the structures Britain had in place to identify foreign interference or any potential threats to democracy.
Iain Duncan Smith, a Conservative lawmaker who has faced sanctions by China, said that the presence in British politics of an active agent of the Chinese government was “a matter of grave concern,” adding that it put people seeking refuge in Britain from the Chinese Communist Party at risk.
Tom Tugendhat, a leading voice on foreign policy in Parliament, said on Twitter that the current case illustrated the need to maintain vigilance against foreign interference.
“It is clear that the challenge from Beijing is increasing, and we need to defend our democracy against hostile activity,” said Mr. Tugendhat, who is the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Select committee.
13. U.S. Diplomats in Geneva, Paris Struck With Suspected ‘Havana Syndrome’
Whoever developed this capability has created quite a weapon.
U.S. Diplomats in Geneva, Paris Struck With Suspected ‘Havana Syndrome’
Mysterious neurological ailment has afflicted as many as 200 U.S. officials in diplomatic posts world-wide
WASHINGTON—Officials serving at U.S. diplomatic missions in Geneva and Paris are suspected to have been afflicted with the mysterious neurological ailment known as Havana Syndrome and at least one was evacuated back to the U.S. for treatment, people familiar with the incidents said.
Suspected attacks on U.S. officials serving in the two European cities were reported internally last summer to officials at those posts and eventually to the State Department in Washington. The diplomats joined as many as 200 others who came down with suspected Havana Syndrome while stationed in China, South America, and elsewhere in Europe.
At least three Americans serving at the consulate in Geneva, a city that hosts nearly a dozen major multilateral organizations, were suspected to have been afflicted by the syndrome, which the Biden administration has dubbed an “anomalous health incident.” At least one of those officials was medevaced from Switzerland to the U.S. for treatment. The mission’s leadership later informed staff about the incidents during a town hall meeting. In Paris, senior embassy officials informed diplomats via email about a suspected case, the officials said, and encouraged others to report any unusual symptoms.
“Due to privacy concerns and for security reasons, we do not discuss specifics or Embassy operations,” State Department spokesman Ned Price said. “We take each report we receive extremely seriously and are working to ensure that affected employees get the care and support they need.”
In November, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the administration was “intently focused” on getting to the bottom of these incidents which, he said, had inflicted profound physical and physiological harm since they were first reported by diplomats serving at the U.S. Embassy in Havana more than five years ago.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in November the Biden administration was ‘intently focused’ on getting to the bottom of these incidents.
Photo: POOL/REUTERS
Symptoms include headaches, dizziness, cognitive difficulties, tinnitus, vertigo and trouble with vision, hearing and balance. Many officials have suffered symptoms years after reporting an incident, while some have been diagnosed with traumatic brain injuries.
The Geneva and Paris cases are the latest in Europe, where cases have also been reported in Austria, Serbia and Germany. The Wall Street Journal also reported nearly half a dozen recent cases at the massive American Embassy complex in Bogotá, Colombia. Consulates in China have also had suspected cases.
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Officials caution that a precise count of victims is difficult to determine because each case must be medically verified and some individuals’ symptoms end up having other explanations.
In the years since the first symptoms emerged, the U.S. government has yet to determine who is behind the attacks and what mechanism or mechanisms are being used.
Jonathan Moore, a career diplomat, was named the new head of the State Department’s Health Incident Response task force in November. Margaret Uyehara, a career foreign service officer with three decades of experience, now serves as a senior care coordinator for those affected by the mysterious incidents.
In early October, President Biden signed the bipartisan HAVANA Act—or Helping American Victims Afflicted by Neurological Attacks Act—into law, which commits the U.S. government to boosting medical support for officials who have been affected.
14. It is time to do away with the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy
This should stir up some discussion (I hope). We need to learn to lead with influence. How should we do that?
Please go to the link to view the chart.
Conclusion:
I can see no reason to keep the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs position any longer other than to serve as a plum to reward political supporters. This was clearly the pool from which candidates were picked in four of the six recent appointments.
The lack of interest and respect for this position leads me to close with two statements from the 1960s. The first I used to end an article (and later a book chapter based on the article, “Politics of Information Warfare in the US“). The second is perpetually pinned to my Twitter profile, which I retweet every now and then as a reminder of the dysfunction represented by the debacle discussed above.
Someday this nation will recognize that global non-military conflict must be pursued with the same intensity and preparation as global military conflicts.
The Orlando Committee, 1963, in a letter to Congress on the demise. The day they hoped for has yet to come.
So long as we remain amateurs in the critical field of political warfare, the billions of dollars we annually spend on defense and foreign aid will provide us with a diminishing measure of protection.
Senator Thomas J. Dodd, 1961
It is time to do away with the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy
Here we are on January 14, days away from the end of the first year of the Biden Administration, and there is still no nomination for the office of Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. There were rumors of a forthcoming nomination around last autumn and recently I heard a nomination could be announced later this year. At this point, who would want a job that has been broadly neglected, often treated as an inconsequential sideshow, and whose authority, already slight, has been substantially reduced over the past couple of years? Considering the history of this post and this administration’s first year, if this administration does nominate someone for this job, they will likely be more Don Draper than Colin Powell, to borrow framing from the author known as Carrying the Gun, because that’s how the role is perceived and that’s the only person that would take it.
Nine months ago, Cole Livieratos and I tried to get an article published on the unrealized potential of the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs as the government’s well-placed central international information officer for US foreign policy (which includes national security, though I sense some feel the two are distinctly separate). As Cole – an active duty US Army Major, trained strategist, Georgetown Ph.D., and currently teaching at West Point – tweeted this week about our earlier effort, “Can’t emphasize enough what that says about how unserious we are about global inform/influence efforts.” Our opening:
The United States harbors a fundamentally broken understanding of information’s role in the success of its foreign policies. Better messaging is not merely a magic combination words and pictures, whether in print or pixels, delivered more quickly than before. It is not pixie dust to be sprinkled to change the subject nor should it be considered a bolt-on to a policy. Policies, especially in today’s increasingly transparent and connected world, react to, rely on, and create perceptions. And yet calls to do better with information often furthers the separationist argument of shifting responsibilities to someone else. The defect that continues to partition the informational element of policy from strategy is conceptual, not structural. The problem starts with the senior-most leadership, starting with the White House and the National Security Council members and staff, who fail to set expectations and enforce accountability of agencies tasked with our nation’s foreign policies, policies that rely on the mutual dependency of actions and words for their success.
The fundamental concept behind the role of the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, despite decades of misunderstanding (the office was established in 1999), was centralized leadership for the execution and coordination of government information and engagement programs abroad and at home. The history of this office is something else. With Congress directing the creation of a new Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy, the Clinton administration replied in December 1998 that it would establish a consolidated leadership position: the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. Despite the title and organization chart, since the first under secretary was sworn in on 1 October 1999, the domestic public affairs activities were never subordinate to the under secretary. More to the point, this office has been left vacant approaching half the time since it was established and, when it was filled, the hiring criteria emphasized Don Draper’s slick selling and not leadership, integration, or accountability.
The willful blindness to appreciating the mutual dependency between information and foreign policy is astounding. Brian Carlson – retired Career Minister of the Foreign Service and former US ambassador – noted the odd detachment in appreciating foreign public opinion’s relationship to our foreign policy and national interests abroad, tweeting, “Ask any politician if they would enter an election campaign without someone working on polling, communication, advertising, interest groups?” Knowing there is some monitoring and reporting of reactions, sentiments, and beliefs abroad by the State Department and other agencies, Brian is addressing the lack of leadership, integration, and accountability. The absence of leadership – which is often the trigger for repeated, and often ignorant, calls to resurrect the United States Information Agency – relegates any knowledge gleaned, recommendations developed, or coordination to optimize resources and activities to happenstance, luck, or the trash bin. Cole and I framed a similar point this way:
It remains dumbfounding that democratic leaders elected on their ability to mobilize public opinion still believe disinformation can be combatted simply by publishing the truth or that the truth is self-evident and self-discovered. These leaders, and the people they appoint, continually fail to place information as coequal, or superior, to political, economic, and military activities that increasingly rely on the informational element for any measure of success.
The administration’s failure to prioritize foreign public opinion’s impact is evident in another agency. The US Agency for Global Media, formerly known as the Broadcasting Board of Governors, oversees the government’s international media operations such as the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, Middle East Broadcast Network, and the Office of Cuba Broadcasting, as well as substantial information freedom operations focused primarily on the internet. Aside from the long-standing fact the agency needs a dramatic organizational makeover, USAGM’s CEO, a Senate-confirmed Presidential appointment, is currently filled by an “acting” official. The Director of VOA, a non-career Senior Executive Service position that is not Senate confirmed but appointed by the Office of Personnel Management, is also an “acting” official.
Broadly Neglected
In the years since the first Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs was sworn in, nine people have been nominated and confirmed to the position. Four served in the two Bush administrations, three served in the two Obama administrations, and one each in the Clinton and Trump administrations. The median tenure of these nine is less than 16 months, while the average time in office is 17 months.
There are two outliers, notably Obama’s last public diplomacy “chief” who served 1029 days. It was known to many at the time that he intended to resign far earlier with departure timed to just pass the previous record in this office of 868 days. Regardless, it is important to separate effectiveness from time in office, especially regarding this office where qualitative analyses of the incumbent tenures are seemingly absent. At the other end is Trump’s under secretary who served precisely 100 days. This person was also remarkably irrelevant to the post, in part because of the lack of relevant experience with foreign policy and “public diplomacy” and because he was one of the few confirmed under secretaries causing him to be pulled into issues unrelated to this office. If we remove these two outliers, the seven remaining officials served an average of 504 days, or a few weeks beyond 16 months.
In addition to the short tenures, most of the appointments were Don Drapers, all but one had no experience working with or in government, let alone an understanding of how foreign policy “sausage” is made and interagency relations work. Recent appointments were drawn from the media world, reflecting enduring short-sighted belief the central problem is getting the word out and not the lack of integration, failure to consider the informational effects of foreign policy, adversarial influence activities, and so on. The “image problem” is a symptom of the problem, it is not the whole problem.
Turnover is just one way to look at how unimportant this office is to successive administrations. When I first ran the numbers on this position in 2011 (see also this and this), I compared this office to the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs. Between 1999 and 2011, there had been six officials confirmed to the public diplomacy position and five confirmed to the political affairs office. Six and five seem at first to be fairly similar, but then there is the time between appointments. The short tenures of the public diplomacy “chief” give away the punchline here: between 1999 and the end of 2011, the Under Secretary for Political Affairs position was vacant 5% of the time while the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs was vacant 30% of the time. Today, the public diplomacy office has been vacant 42.6% of the days since the first official was sworn in back in 1999. Whether you work in the private sector or in government, an extended absence of a confirmed boss is detrimental to operations, especially in a competitive, demanding, and necessarily collaborative environment.
Another angle to see priority given to this position by administrations is the time to confirm the first incumbent. In the Bush administration, the first under secretary was sworn in 254 days into the first administration. The nomination had been made months earlier but lingered in Congress until it was suddenly accelerated due to 9/11. The Obama administration’s first under secretary was sworn in 124 days into the administration, and the Trump administration had its under secretary sworn in at 316 days. Today, we are 358 days into the Biden administration without even a nomination.
Sideshow
If the lack of attention to appointing someone to the office is not enough evidence of neglect and disinterest in the office, consider the times when there was an under secretary in office. For most of this century, it was a parlor game in academia to wonder how each new under secretary would define “public diplomacy.” This is not the same as wondering how each leader would interpret their mission, after all, each new Under Secretary for Political Affairs came in with a different approach. The latter, however, would not have interested parties – whether staff, partners, or outside observers – wondering how they would redefine “political affairs.” To be fair, part of the confusion over “public diplomacy” owes to the reason the term was adopted: to defend an agency – USIA – rather than to apply to means and outcomes.
This office has not been held accountable with failures and problems treated as inconsequential. Take the hot mess that was the Bureau of International Information Programs during the first Obama administration, as detailed in an extensive Office of Inspector General report. The bureau was allowed to fester under toxic leadership across two under secretaries. IIP is important, or rather was, because it was the largest rump of USIA. Returning to the under secretary, the office came to exist outside of the Secretary’s inner circle with incumbents either intentionally withdrawing from interagency collaboration or variously unwilling or unable to follow up on requests and commitments resulting in a lack of confidence across the board, including the national security council and other departments.
The absence of accountability is its own measure of importance by leadership. In the case of the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, the need for the Defense Department to step into the “strategic communication” realm reflects not just a failure of the under secretary, but acquiescence by the Secretary of State and the White House of the marginal role of the under secretary. We can also see disregard for the office in the Obama administration’s failure to follow through on its “comprehensive interagency strategy on public diplomacy and strategic communication” and the creation of the Global Engagement Center, and its predecessor agency. There were also countless times where the under secretary failed to support, either directly or a direct-report failed to support, national security council requests, interagency partner requests, and the State Department’s own needs abroad. These acts further marginalized the office at the operational level.
Reduced Authority
In 2019, the State Department picked over the decimated and demoralized IIP, selectively moving some elements into the Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs as it inserted “global” before public affairs in its title. It might be better to think of the revised operation as the Bureau of Greater Public Affairs as a better reflection of the revised bureau despite stated interest in shuttering of IIP and reassigning its assets.
In addition to the under secretary no longer having control of the global operation of IIP that directly engaged foreign publics and directly supported State Department posts abroad (sometimes questionably owing wholly to variously bad and narrow-minded leadership at IIP), the under secretary lost its other big subordinate. The Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs did not provide the under secretary substantial opportunities as much of ECA’s budget was non-discretionary owing, in large part, to Congressional interests, but it was still part of the under secretary’s portfolio. However, during the Obama administration, this bureau rejected that it was subordinate to the under secretary, which the State Department, notably the Secretary, did little to nothing to correct.
The under secretary is nominally a leader – I hesitate to write “in charge of” – the Global Engagement Center, but in reality this is a stretch. GEC, and its predecessor, is arguably the result of successive under secretaries failing to exercise the potential of their office – of their high position, of IIP, etc – by first the White House (which established GEC and its predecessor through executive order) and then Congress (who hurriedly pushed legislation to authorize GEC, and to expand its mission, through legislation before the Trump administration came in).
With regard to the State Department’s own operations, the under secretary has a dotted line of authority, at best, to the department’s posts abroad. Substantially greater authority over these posts, with solid lines on the org chart, comes from the chief of mission and the geographic bureaus.
It Is Time
The trend of reducing the authority of the chief international information officer has been consistently downward since the State Department first established the Assistant Secretary for Public and Cultural Relations in December 1944. That first office was charged with both foreign and domestic information and engagement activities of the department as well as supervising the department’s “relations with other Government agencies on all matters involving public information policy.” Perversely, despite the increasing importance of public opinion to our foreign policy, including national security, the importance of information to successive administrations seems to be virtually nil, save for the occasional call for more pixie dust.
I have long argued, as Cole and I argued in our unwanted and unpublished draft, in the importance of integrating information with, and not beside or outside of, our foreign policy design, development, and execution. This means integrating the informational function within the State Department. As Cole and I wrote:
Rearranging organizational diagrams will not replace leadership just as strategy is just a word without leadership and accountability. Centralizing information functions into one bureaucracy will exacerbate the worst tendencies of the foreign policy and national security agencies to ignore the informational element of policy altogether. Properly employing the information element of national power is more than reacting to disinformation, anticipating adversarial actions, or exploitable opportunities. It requires integration from the identification of objectives across the policymaking process of our political, military, and economic agencies and through the execution and support of these policies. The United States needs strong leadership to demand this integration from the White House and National Security Council down through the cabinet departments and other agencies to succeed in foreign policy and enhance America’s national security.
We lack the leadership to make the necessary changes. Perhaps the solution is to give up on the central international information operations officer that is the under secretary and abolish the position, distribute what little is left of the authorities and the mandate, and reconceptualize leadership here. No, this does not mean recreating USIA which would have the negative effect of segregating information from policy and reinforcing the “not my job” approach to the informational effects of policies. I recommend the Under Secretary for Political Affairs gain the majority of the remaining authorities, including the Bureau of Global Public Affairs, to integrate the informational function with the regional bureaus and posts. While some will lament the dilution of “public diplomacy,” in reality, this is closer to the model that worked before the State Department once again rejected direct contact with foreign publics, which led first to the International Information Administration in 1952 and then subsequently to USIA so the Secretary, he claimed, could “focus” on his core mission of diplomacy. We could also do away with the artificial “public diplomacy” label and replace it with “global public affairs,” either as an interim or long-term solution. Most do not realize “public diplomacy” was adopted after two decades of “public affairs” in a public relations gambit to support the independence of USIA in the face of calls for better coordination with the State Department or be reintegrated with the department. Besides being at the heart of department’s activities in DC and the field, and having the respect of interagency partners, recent Under Secretaries for Political Affairs grasp the importance of global public affairs to foreign policy.
I can see no reason to keep the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs position any longer other than to serve as a plum to reward political supporters. This was clearly the pool from which candidates were picked in four of the six recent appointments.
The lack of interest and respect for this position leads me to close with two statements from the 1960s. The first I used to end an article (and later a book chapter based on the article, “Politics of Information Warfare in the US“). The second is perpetually pinned to my Twitter profile, which I retweet every now and then as a reminder of the dysfunction represented by the debacle discussed above.
Someday this nation will recognize that global non-military conflict must be pursued with the same intensity and preparation as global military conflicts.
The Orlando Committee, 1963, in a letter to Congress on the demise. The day they hoped for has yet to come.
So long as we remain amateurs in the critical field of political warfare, the billions of dollars we annually spend on defense and foreign aid will provide us with a diminishing measure of protection.
Senator Thomas J. Dodd, 1961
*****
15. Japan a valuable partner in resistance to China’s authoritarian advances
It would be good to have all allies coordinate responses to China's authoritarian advances. I hope others can follow Japan's example.
Japan a valuable partner in resistance to China’s authoritarian advances
As Communist China increases hostilities in the Indo-Pacific region, Japan is stepping up, not only with bold statements against China’s intimidation but with action—including military contingency planning with the U.S. and joint defense agreements with regional allies.
Foreign policy successes aren’t always flashy. But several recent accomplishments in the Indo-Pacific region are collectively affirming a more enhanced allied deterrence against Chinese intimidation of Taiwan, Japan’s growing security role outside of its alliance with Washington, and U.S. commitment to the defense of the region.
The first success saw Washington and Tokyo developing combined contingency plans for responding to a Taiwan crisis with communist China. The allied military planning was necessitated by China’s increasing threats toward Taiwan. While the United States has long had a role in Taiwan defense contingencies, the prospects of Japan’s involvement in them have long been complicated by the legal intricacies of its post-World War II passivism.
During the past year, however, Tokyo has issued increasingly bold statements of support for Taiwan against Chinese intimidation, even hinting at military support if Beijing attacked Taiwan.
Last year, Defense Minister Nobuo Kishi declared that the security of Taiwan was directly linked to that of Japan. Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso asserted that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would be an “existential threat (to Japan) since Okinawa could be next” and would necessitate a joint Japanese-U.S. response to defend the island.
Tokyo has been studying possible military responses to a conflict over Taiwan, including protecting U.S. warships and military planes coming to Taiwan’s defense. In 2021, Washington and Tokyo drafted a combined operation plan, including establishing a U.S. Marine Corps attack base on Japan’s southwest islands if a Taiwan attack appeared imminent. Japanese Self-Defense Forces would provide unidentified support to the operation.
The second recent success saw Japan and Australia signing a Reciprocal Access Agreement this month to enhance defense cooperation and the interoperability of their military forces. The agreement will allow more efficient coordination during combined military training exercises as well as disaster response operations.
In recent years, Japan has steadily increased military cooperation with Australia and other regional partners, stepping up its regional security role to address common threats in the Indo-Pacific. In November 2021, Japanese naval forces conducted a protection mission of Australian ships, the first time they ever conducted a mission with a country other than the U.S.
Japanese forces had been precluded from protecting other nations’ forces until 2015 legislation allowed for collective self-defense. Having set the precedent for expanding its security protection beyond its U.S. alliance partner, Japan is now considering similar exercises with the United Kingdom, France, and Canada, and possibly Germany and India.
Finally, for the third foreign policy accomplishment worth noting, this month, the United States and Japan will sign an updated Special Measures Agreement outlining Tokyo’s contribution to offsetting the cost of stationing U.S. forces in Japan. These periodic negotiations are always difficult, since they involve money, but are typically mundane and handled by working-level diplomats. During the past few years, however, these negotiations were more contentious, as they focused more on the payments than the purposes of the alliance themselves.
The forthcoming U.S.-Japan agreement marked a return to the former, traditional approach to negotiations. Putting our disagreements behind us and turning the page on the agreement enables Washington and Tokyo to now focus on addressing common threats rather than the internal mechanics of the alliance.
Under long-serving Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Japan strengthened its alliance with the United States, undertook an increasingly firm security stance against Chinese and North Korean threats, and set the intellectual foundations for the successful and ongoing Free and Open Indo-Pacific strategy and the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue amongst Japan, the United States, Australia, and India.
Current Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has expressed concerns about China’s growing military strength and called Taiwan “the front line in the struggle by democracies to resist authoritarianism’s advance.” This latest series of seemingly minor policy wins will help the U.S. make the most out of Tokyo’s new-found clarity.
Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email [email protected] and we’ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature. Remember to include the URL or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.
16. At Request of U.S., Russia Rounds Up 14 REvil Ransomware Affiliates
An interesting development.
Excerpts:
So why now? Russia has amassed approximately 100,000 troops along its southern border with Ukraine, and diplomatic efforts to defuse the situation have reportedly broken down. The Washington Post and other media outlets today report that the Biden administration has accused Moscow of sending saboteurs into Eastern Ukraine to stage an incident that could give Putin a pretext for ordering an invasion.
“The most interesting thing about these arrests is the timing,” said Kevin Breen, director of threat research at Immersive Labs. “For years, Russian Government policy on cybercriminals has been less than proactive to say the least. With Russia and the US currently at the diplomatic table, these arrests are likely part of a far wider, multi-layered, political negotiation.”
President Biden has warned that Russia can expect severe sanctions should it choose to invade Ukraine. But Putin in turn has said such sanctions could cause a complete break in diplomatic relations between the two countries.
At Request of U.S., Russia Rounds Up 14 REvil Ransomware Affiliates
The Russian government said today it arrested 14 people accused of working for “REvil,” a particularly aggressive ransomware group that has extorted hundreds of millions of dollars from victim organizations. The Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) said the actions were taken in response to a request from U.S. officials, but many experts believe the crackdown is part of an effort to reduce tensions over Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to station 100,000 troops along the nation’s border with Ukraine.
The FSB headquarters at Lubyanka Square, Moscow. Image: Wikipedia.
The FSB said it arrested 14 REvil ransomware members, and searched more than two dozen addresses in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Leningrad and Lipetsk. As part of the raids, the FSB seized more than $600,000 US dollars, 426 million rubles (~$USD 5.5 million), 500,000 euros, and 20 “premium cars” purchased with funds obtained from cybercrime.
“The search activities were based on the appeal of the US authorities, who reported on the leader of the criminal community and his involvement in encroaching on the information resources of foreign high-tech companies by introducing malicious software, encrypting information and extorting money for its decryption,” the FSB said. “Representatives of the US competent authorities have been informed about the results of the operation.”
The FSB did not release the names of any of the individuals arrested, although a report from the Russian news agency TASS mentions two defendants: Roman Gennadyevich Muromsky, and Andrey Sergeevich Bessonov. Russian media outlet RIA Novosti released video footage from some of the raids:
REvil is widely thought to be a reincarnation of GandCrab, a Russian-language ransomware affiliate program that bragged of stealing more than $2 billion when it closed up shop in the summer of 2019. For roughly the next two years, REvil’s “Happy Blog” would churn out press releases naming and shaming dozens of new victims each week. A February 2021 analysis from researchers at IBM found the REvil gang earned more than $120 million in 2020 alone.
It is clear that U.S. authorities have known for some time the real names of REvil’s top captains and moneymakers. Last fall, President Biden told Putin that he expects Russia to act when the United States shares information on specific Russians involved in ransomware activity.
So why now? Russia has amassed approximately 100,000 troops along its southern border with Ukraine, and diplomatic efforts to defuse the situation have reportedly broken down. The Washington Post and other media outlets today report that the Biden administration has accused Moscow of sending saboteurs into Eastern Ukraine to stage an incident that could give Putin a pretext for ordering an invasion.
“The most interesting thing about these arrests is the timing,” said Kevin Breen, director of threat research at Immersive Labs. “For years, Russian Government policy on cybercriminals has been less than proactive to say the least. With Russia and the US currently at the diplomatic table, these arrests are likely part of a far wider, multi-layered, political negotiation.”
President Biden has warned that Russia can expect severe sanctions should it choose to invade Ukraine. But Putin in turn has said such sanctions could cause a complete break in diplomatic relations between the two countries.
Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder of and former chief technology officer for the security firm CrowdStrike, called the REvil arrests in Russia “ransomware diplomacy.”
“This is Russian ransomware diplomacy,” Alperovitch said on Twitter. “It is a signal to the United States — if you don’t enact severe sanctions against us for invasion of Ukraine, we will continue to cooperate with you on ransomware investigations.”
The REvil arrests were announced as many government websites in Ukraine were defaced by hackers with an ominous message warning Ukrainians that their personal data was being uploaded to the Internet. “Be afraid and expect the worst,” the message warned.
Experts say there is good reason for Ukraine to be afraid. Ukraine has long been used as the testing grounds for Russian offensive hacking capabilities. State-backed Russian hackers have been blamed for the Dec. 23, 2015 cyberattack on Ukraine’s power grid that left 230,000 customers shivering in the dark.
The warning left behind on Ukrainian government websites that were defaced in the last 24 hours. The same statement is written in Ukrainian, Russian and Polish.
Russia also has been suspected of releasing NotPetya, a large-scale cyberattack initially aimed at Ukrainian businesses that ended up creating an extremely disruptive and expensive global malware outbreak.
Although there has been no clear attribution of these latest attacks to Russia, there is reason to suspect Russia’s hand, said David Salvo, deputy director of The Alliance for Securing Democracy.
“These are tried and true Russian tactics. Russia used cyber operations and information operations in the run-up to its invasion of Georgia in 2008. It has long waged massive cyberattacks against Ukrainian infrastructure, as well as information operations targeting Ukrainian soldiers and Ukrainian citizens. And it is completely unsurprising that it would use these tactics now when it is clear Moscow is looking for any pretext to invade Ukraine again and cast blame on the West in its typical cynical fashion.”
17. Seditious Conspiracy: What to Make of the Latest Oath Keepers Indictment
Interesting analysis.
Seditious Conspiracy: What to Make of the Latest Oath Keepers Indictment
In remarks last week, Attorney General Merrick Garland defended the Justice Department’s strategy for prosecuting participants in the Jan. 6 insurrection by noting the following:
We build investigations by laying a foundation. We resolve more straightforward cases first because they provide the evidentiary foundation for more complex cases. Investigating the more overt crimes generates linkages to less overt ones. Overt actors and the evidence they provide can lead us to others who may also have been involved. And that evidence can serve as the foundation for further investigative leads and techniques.
Now this deliberate approach may finally be bearing some fruit. Yesterday, Jan. 13, the Justice Department unsealed the indictment of Stewart Rhodes—the founder and leader of the right-wing Oath Keepers militia—and several of his deputies for playing central roles in orchestrating the assault on the U.S. Capitol.
In particular, the indictment sets out the most serious criminal charge yet used against any of the Capitol rioters: seditious conspiracy. Although the maximum penalty for seditious conspiracy, twenty years imprisonment, is less than that for many other federal crimes, seditious conspiracy remains an exceptionally serious, and rarely prosecuted, criminal offense because of its expressive effect. To label something sedition goes beyond normal criminality, suggesting that the conduct strikes at the heart of American democracy and falls within the same conceptual category as the most serious political crimes like rebellion, insurrection and treason. Thus, those wishing to see greater accountability for the events of Jan. 6 are likely to be heartened by this latest filing, as the Justice Department lays out a strong factual case that will bring serious legal penalties and hopefully a greater public recognition that the events of Jan. 6 were one of the most serious attacks on democracy in American history.
But the indictment also shows the limits of the criminal law in responding to Jan. 6. To limit inevitable legal challenges, the Justice Department has centered its case on the sorts of violent acts that are among the least controversial applications of the seditious conspiracy statute and related criminal provisions. And while this constrained model of a conspiracy may well maximize the chances of holding Rhodes and other similarly situated defendants accountable, it most likely excludes those political leaders who drove the events of Jan. 6—including the man who many believe bears the greatest responsibility, former President Donald Trump.
According to the indictment, Rhodes began to plan for a rebellion just two days after the 2020 presidential election, when he told Oath Keeper members to reject Biden’s victory. “We aren’t getting through this without a civil war,” he said on an encrypted Signal chat. Over the following weeks, Rhodes called on other Oath Keepers in open letters and private chats to use violence to stop Biden from assuming office. In one instance, he said that if Biden were to assume the presidency, “We will have to do a bloody, massively bloody revolution against them.”
Beginning in December 2020, Rhodes and other Oath Keeper members made plans to travel to Washington, D.C. around Jan. 6, the date of the certification of the Electoral College vote. In preparation, prosecutors say, they recruited members to participate in their plan, held training sessions on paramilitary combat tactics, and transported weapons and tactical gear to the D.C. area. One Oath Keeper, Thomas Caldwell, claimed to have traveled to Washington, D.C. for a reconnaissance trip.
Prosecutors allege that on Jan. 6, Oath Keeper members positioned themselves around D.C.—several by the Capitol while others waited just outside the city in quick reactionary force teams. Some Oath Keepers at the Capitol split into two teams to form military style “stacks” and breach the Capitol, forcing their way past law enforcement officers.
The Oath Keepers’s plot didn’t stop at the Capitol siege, according to the indictment. On the evening of Jan. 6, Rhodes and other members met to celebrate the attack and discuss their next steps. In the following week, members continued to communicate about their plans and Rhodes allegedly spent around $17,500 on weapons and ammunition. And prosecutors claim that around Inauguration Day, Rhodes contacted other members to organize local militias to oppose the Biden administration.
Several of these charges had previously been brought against nine of the eleven defendants—everyone but Rhodes and co-defendant Edward Vallejo—in earlier indictments. Those indictments, which have been repeatedly superseded as new charges and defendants have been added, centered on a more conventional criminal conspiracy (18 U.S.C. § 371) to obstruct the electoral vote certification (18 U.S.C. § 1512(c)(2)) and did not include charges for seditious conspiracy, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, or conspiracy to prevent members of Congress from executing their official duties. As the Justice Department explained in a related press release, it intends to continue to pursue these preexisting charges—which include charges for unlawfully entering restricted grounds (18 U.S.C. § 1752) that are not included in the United States v. Rhodes indictment—against the seven remaining defendants in that matter, for which it issued a new superseding indictment under the caption United States v. Crowl. Meanwhile, it will prosecute the other nine defendants now included in the Rhodes indictment separately alongside Rhodes and Vallejo. The Department also unsealed a third separate indictment against Jonathan Walden, another member of the Oath Keepers included in earlier indictments, that the Justice Department intends to prosecute separately on obstructing an official proceeding (18 U.S.C. § 1512(c)(2)) and unlawfully entering restricted grounds (18 U.S.C. § 1752) alone. Four other Oath Keepers charged in prior related indictments have since pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate with law enforcement, and are not included in this revised trio of indictments.
The distinguishing factor between the Rhodes and Crowl defendants appears to be their respective roles within the Oath Keepers organization and related planning for Jan. 6. In the revised complaint, several of the defendants in Crowl are described as being relatively new “recruits” to the Oath Keepers, with some even submitting membership applications or inquiring as to the membership process in the course of preparing for the events of Jan. 6. Others are in clearly subsidiary roles, taking directions from other members and even going so far as to refer to them as “commander.” By contrast, all eleven of the defendants in Rhodes are alleged to have taken steps to recruit participants, secure training and equipment, conduct reconnaissance and otherwise help plan for their activities on Jan. 6, including the attack on the Capitol. In many cases, they communicated through Signal channels expressly designated for Oath Keeper leadership and are alleged to have continued coordinating even after Jan. 6 by continuing to secure firearms and related equipment, coordinating their movements, consciously keeping a low profile, inquiring with Rhodes and others regarding “next steps” and internally discussing “Civil War 2.0” following Biden’s inauguration. This evidence of shared intent and coordination is no doubt what led the Justice Department to bring the much more specific conspiracy charges, including seditious conspiracy, leveled in Rhodes, all of which carry criminal penalties well above the five years of imprisonment provided for by the conventional criminal conspiracy statute. By contrast, the revised indictment covering Jonathan Walden drops even the criminal conspiracy charges that he’d previously faced.
As its name suggests, seditious conspiracy, the main charge, requires the government to establish both the existence of a conspiracy and that its aim was sedition. To satisfy the former, the standard elements of conspiracy apply: an agreement between multiple people to commit some unlawful act. In addition, while some jurisdictions require an overt act taken in furtherance of conspiracy, this is not a requirement for seditious conspiracy—though even if it were, the indictment alleges plenty of such acts.
What makes seditious conspiracy special—and a rarely invoked offense—is the sedition part. Specifically, under Section 2384, an individual has committed sedition when they “conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States … or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof.” While the facts alleged in the indictment could plausibly be characterized as opposing by force the authority of the U.S. government, the indictment alleges the broader formulation of sedition: the use of force to prevent, hinder or delay the execution of a law—specifically, the constitutional and statutory provisions surrounding the transfer of power after a presidential election.
Importantly, the alleged conduct at issue avoids the problem the government faced during the most recent seditious-conspiracy prosecution: the failed attempt to prosecute members of the Christian military “Hutaree” group in Michigan, which sought to kill a police officer so as to provoke a “more wide-spread uprising against the Government.” In that case, the district court threw out the seditious-conspiracy charge because, while the Hutarees were plotting to attack government officials, they were not planning to “forcibly resist a positive show of authority by the Federal Government.” By contrast, this indictment does not rely on the Oath Keepers’ plans to attack Congress per se, but rather to act so as to disrupt the certification of the electoral college vote. And given the successful seditious-conspiracy prosecutions in 1950s of Puerto Rican national terrorists who stormed the Capitol and shot several congressmen in the name of Puerto Rican independence, it’s not clear that the narrow interpretation of seditious conspiracy used in the Hutaree case would even apply here.
Because the alleged conduct describes the core of what the seditious conspiracy statute was meant to outlaw—if attacking the seat of democratic government to prevent the peaceful transfer of power isn’t seditious conspiracy, what is?—the only plausible legal argument remaining for the defendants is a full-out attack on the statute itself. But facial attacks on Section 2384 have not been successful; for example, in upholding seditious conspiracy convictions arising out of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld the statute against a facial attack based on overbreadth and vagueness, holding that the statute’s force requirement was compatible with the First Amendment and its definition of sedition was sufficiently detailed. (And indeed, likely to avoid any First Amendment issues, the department seems to have erred on the side of caution here by declining to make other charges, like advocating for the overthrow of the government (18 U.S.C. 2385), that the indictment's allegations of the Oath Keepers' communications would arguably support.)
The defendants’ best argument against the seditious conspiracy charge may not be legal but prudential. Pre-WWII prosecutions for sedition have made for some of the worst chapters in American law enforcement, targeting political dissenters in ways that would be flatly unconstitutional under our current understanding of the First Amendment. And the statute’s breadth—although it requires the use of force, it is sufficient that force is used “to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States” (emphasis added)—makes it easy to abuse even today. For example, in September 2020, the Department of Justice advised prosecutors to consider seditious conspiracy charges against protesters who committed violence against federal buildings and property in connection with the wide-scale protests against police violence in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. Do we really want the government to be able to brand racial-justice protests—even violent ones that might otherwise be criminal—as “sedition”? The concern with a broad seditious-conspiracy statute is especially acute given that federal law already criminalizes “rebellion or insurrection against the authority of the United States or the laws thereof,” a provision that might be seen as more naturally encompassing the Oath Keepers’ actions without the breadth of seditious conspiracy.
But these concerns, although certainly legitimate, are unlikely to help the Oath Keepers. Seditious conspiracy is hardly unique when it comes to broad federal criminal laws. Courts routinely rely on prosecutorial discretion to enforce broad criminal statutes responsibly. Nor do judges like to micromanage charging decisions, especially where, as here, the seditious conspiracy statute has the advantage of being more recently used than the archaic rebellion statute. Perhaps it would be better if Congress revamped Chapter 115 of Title 18—“treason, sedition, and subversive activities”—so as to provide a set of narrow, clearly defined offenses with which to deal with attacks on democracy. But until they do that, there is no obvious legal bar to the sorts of prosecutions that this indictment involves.
There’s something else missing from the indictment as well: any indication of involvement in the alleged conspiracy by political leaders outside the Oath Keepers. As described by the Justice Department, there’s no hint that the group’s plans for violence extended beyond the circle of the Oath Keepers themselves to include Trump, his associates or any of the members of Congress who voiced support for efforts to “stop the steal.” That’s particularly notable given accusations by some lawmakers that their colleagues played a role in planning the attack. Absent as well is Trump associate Roger Stone, who was guarded by Oath Keepers on Jan. 6 before the attack on the Capitol began.
Nor do these political leaders seem to fit within the vision of the seditious conspiracy laid out by the Justice Department. The case against Rhodes and his co-defendants focuses narrowly on those directly involved in the Oath Keepers’s effort to plan for and facilitate acts of violence on Jan. 6—to the point that it even excludes other Oath Keepers who participated in those events but do not appear to have had a role in planning them. (The latter are instead being charged as part of a non-seditious criminal conspiracy, which carries a lighter criminal penalty.) And there are few signs that any political leaders were involved in such planning to the same degree or in the same way as the Oath Keepers being prosecuted alongside Rhodes.
When it comes to Trump, in fact, the indictment includes a message from Rhodes that actually seems to cut against any potential entanglement by the former president in the conspiracy. At 1:30 p.m. on Jan. 6, just after rioters began storming the Capitol, Rhodes texted on Signal, “All I see Trump doing is complaining. I see no intent by him to do anything. So the patriots are taking it into their own hands. They’ve had enough.” This certainly doesn’t sound like a message from someone who had been plotting with Trump or was waiting for his signal to start smashing windows.
So however significant this indictment is, it’s not a sign that the D.C. grand jury is about to unveil charges of seditious conspiracy against the former president—at least not on these facts. Does this mean that accountability for Jan. 6 in criminal court will only go as far as Stewart Rhodes? Not necessarily—as Garland noted in his speech, investigations progress gradually. And the criminal cases brought thus far in the sprawling web of Jan. 6 prosecutions also describe how the Proud Boys engaged in their own efforts, separate from the Oath Keepers, to plan the Capitol attack and rile up the crowd. It’s possible to sketch out what a similar seditious conspiracy indictment might look like against the Proud Boys, which have also been linked to Stone—and perhaps, through Stone, to the White House. But while the Oath Keepers indictment doesn’t rule that out, it doesn’t promise it, either.
18. Psy-Ops are a crucial weapon in the war against disinformation
For doctrinal purists (in the military) it is PSYOP versus Psy-ops.
But on a more serious note, this is an important conclusion. Not only do we need to vaccinate against COVID we need to inoculate the population against disinformation. That requires exposing adversaries strategies but also requires critical thinking on the part of the population.
Conclusion:
But as with Covid, the most important task in psychological defence is to inoculate the population against believing false information — a job that Sweden’s new agency will also handle. This involves teaching the public how to verify information. A citizenry able to distinguish truth from falsehoods is vital, not just from a national security perspective but for protection from more everyday threats such as quack cures peddled on the internet.
Other countries, too, should show they’re serious about fighting the disinformation virus and immunising against it. Otherwise it will undermine our societies and render even the most sophisticated military defences useless.
I hate to beat a dead horse but these are wise words from the 2017 NSS:
"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."
Psy-Ops are a crucial weapon in the war against disinformation
The writer is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a think-tank
When Sweden’s Navy tried to hunt down a suspected enemy submarine in the Stockholm archipelago eight years ago, its efforts were ridiculed by Russian media and officials, who trolled their armed forces chief and accused him of pursuing a “phantom” vessel. Since then, hostile states including Russia, China and Iran have increased their use of disinformation and online propaganda to amplify anti-vax sentiment and foment political tensions in Europe and the US. Concerned about the potential for this to undermine democracy, Sweden has just launched an agency for psychological defence. Other countries would do well to follow its example.
Mikael Tofvesson, head of the new agency’s operative division, says aggressors are increasingly trying to sow division by targeting areas of public concern such as crime, Covid vaccinations, the government’s response to the pandemic, and immigration. “These are low-intensity campaigns that are constantly in operation, and when a specific issue is in the news the activity increases,” he tells me.
As many countries have found, the pandemic has spawned a new breed of disinformation, which has spread as rampantly as the virus. This is not only from usual suspects but also from new actors, who are copying Moscow and Beijing’s methods. Private sector organisations are using a commercial offering known as “disinformation as a service” to conduct malign influence operations against their competitors.
The results are alarmingly obvious. Disputes about Covid-19 and the vaccines to fight it are already dividing populations. And just as the minority of people who refuse vaccines undermine wider efforts to stamp out the virus, a minority of citizens can ruin their countries’ resilience against adversaries by believing the damaging falsehoods spread by the other side. The rumour unleashed by Russia’s KGB in the 1980s that the US army created HIV — which is still in circulation now — shows the lasting harm of an eye-catching campaign. The Covid pandemic has been fuelled by the fact many people believe anti-vax disinformation and distrust messaging from their own governments. Just imagine the effect that incendiary disinformation could have on the current stand-off between Russia and Nato.
Public trust in the government is the Achilles heel of western democracies seeking to defend themselves against innovative adversaries. Disinformation aimed at weakening public confidence in its military forces or political leadership can have a potent destabilising effect. The US’s deep social and ideological divisions may be rooted in its domestic political history, but Moscow’s disinformation campaign ahead of the 2016 presidential election helped to sow doubt about America’s democratic institutions.
The Swedish Psychological Defence Agency will monitor malign influence by exposing both the aggressors and their methods. I believe it should go further, by launching information counter-strikes against the offending country’s ruling elite. In future, Nato and its allies could respond to disinformation campaigns by revealing some of the overseas properties owned by senior officials in the hostile country.
But as with Covid, the most important task in psychological defence is to inoculate the population against believing false information — a job that Sweden’s new agency will also handle. This involves teaching the public how to verify information. A citizenry able to distinguish truth from falsehoods is vital, not just from a national security perspective but for protection from more everyday threats such as quack cures peddled on the internet.
Other countries, too, should show they’re serious about fighting the disinformation virus and immunising against it. Otherwise it will undermine our societies and render even the most sophisticated military defences useless.
19. Analysis: China is still the ultimate prize that Western banks can't resist
Analysis: China is still the ultimate prize that Western banks can't resist
CNN · by Analysis by Laura He, CNN Business
A version of this story appeared in CNN's Meanwhile in China newsletter, a three-times-a-week update exploring what you need to know about the country's rise and how it impacts the world. Sign up here.
Hong Kong (CNN Business)For many companies, doing business in China is getting trickier by the day. But Western banks and asset managers are more than willing to up their bets on the world's second biggest economy, convinced that the opportunities remain too good to pass up.
Major banks in recent weeks have inked deals to expand their footprint in China — or are otherwise attempting to take greater control of their businesses there — after years of being forced to enter the market via joint ventures. That's despite fraught geopolitics, a slowing economy and an increasingly hostile environment for private business.
Late last month, HSBC (HBCYF) received approval from Chinese regulators to take full control of its life insurance joint venture, which was created in 2009 in equal partnership with a Chinese company under rules that were rolled back in 2020. The bank said the move underscored its "commitment to expanding business in China."
The British banking giant is also seeking a greater stake in HSBC Qianhai, its joint securities venture in China, according to Reuters, which cited an anonymous source. HSBC declined to comment to CNN Business.
HSBC (HBCYF) isn't the only one. Wall Street A-listers such as BlackRock, JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs are already a few steps down that road. And the state-owned China Securities Journal reported Wednesday that Deutsche Bank (DB) wants to establish its own wealth management joint venture in the country. The German bank declined to comment.
"The sheer size of China's virtually untapped equity and bond market is irresistible to the world's large financial institutions, especially since Beijing is finally allowing them to operate wholly owned mutual funds," said Alex Capri, a research fellow at the Hinrich Foundation.
China is the world's second biggest market for stocks and bonds. But it's largely untapped by foreign investors: International holdings account for about 5% of the $14 trillion stock market, and less than 4% of the $17 trillion onshore bond market, according to stock exchange and central bank data.
That started to change last year, after BlackRock (BLK) — the world's largest asset manager — in June became the first global firm to gain approval for a wholly owned Chinese mutual fund business. Two months later, BlackRock launched its first mutual fund in the country, and quickly raised $1 billion from more than 111,000 investors.
In October, Goldman Sachs (GS), received the green light to fully take over its securities venture. And Morgan Stanley (MSPRE) followed suit with a victory of its own in December, when its Chinese partner said the American bank planned to boost its stake in a brokerage venture to 94%.
More are coming. Earlier this week, China's securities regulator said it accepted an application from BNP Paribas (BNPQF) to establish a securities firm, bringing the company a step closer to broadening its presence in the country.
"China represents a significant growth opportunity for global financial service companies," said Brendan Ahern, chief investment officer for KraneShares, an asset management firm focused on China stocks and bonds.
"Developed markets such as the United States and Europe are highly competitive and mature which have led to fee compression and diminishing opportunities," he added. But "China's markets are relatively young in comparison."
Expansion despite uncertainty
The significant inroads for these banks are coming about two decades after China joined the World Trade Organization and promised to open up its financial sector.
While progress was slow for a while, the country in 2019 announced that it would entirely remove foreign ownership limits for financial firms the following year, shortly after Chinese President Xi Jinping and former US President Donald Trump agreed to restart trade talks.
The enthusiasm from global banks and asset managers also comes with risks, as there is growing uncertainty about China's political and regulatory climate — as well as Beijing's rising tensions with other countries.
In late 2020, Beijing launched an unprecedented regulatory squeeze on private enterprise, worried that such firms had become too powerful. The ensuing crackdown has extended to major Chinese financial players like Ant Group, which was forced to overhaul its business and hew to strict regulations governing bank operations.
"There is a sense, broadly, that Xi may moderate some of his more aggressive rhetoric after this year's 20th Party Congress, having assured his political position," said Craig Singleton, an adjunct China fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, referring to the widespread expectation that Xi will use an important political gathering to cement a historic third term in office. "The biggest risk, however, is that he does the opposite."
A number of Western businesses have been swept up in controversy in China as geopolitical tensions worsen, especially over allegations of human rights violations in the country's western region of Xinjiang.
In recent weeks, Walmart (WMT) and Intel (INTC) met public backlash in China over allegations that they were trying to avoid importing products sourced from Xinjiang. And last year, H&M, Nike (NKE) Adidas (ADDDF) and other Western retailers were threatened with a boycott in China because of the stand they had taken against the alleged use of forced labor to produce cotton in Xinjiang.
Pressure at home
Western companies are also facing pressures at home. Billionaire investor George Soros called BlackRock (BLK)'s China investment a "tragic mistake" that could lose money for its clients and imperil US national security. Some American politicians also called on Wall Street to stop "enabling Communist China" and take a tougher stance against Beijing.
The squeeze has continued in recent weeks. Last month, US President Joe Biden signed the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, a law that bans imports from Xinjiang over concerns about forced labor. It sent a clear message that his administration and Congress are looking to ratchet up the pressure on Beijing.
China's decision to let more foreign firms into the country is "aimed at shoring up collateral damage in the international community," according to Capri, who added that allowing Western companies to take larger stakes in China also gives Beijing "leverage" over Washington and Brussels.
"This will increase tensions between the big financial firms in the US and Europe, and their home governments," he said.
The moneymaking potential in China seems to outweigh any political headaches, though.
"While China is facing huge economic headwinds, the country has defied bearish predictions in the past," Singleton said, adding that Western banks have continued to generate billions of dollars in revenue from China, even with the recent regulatory crackdown.
"In other words, Western banks are playing the long game under the guise of portfolio diversification," he added.
China's motive
And even as Beijing tightens its grip over parts of its economy, there are reasons why the country is eager to open its financial industry to foreign investors.
The government wants to utilize global expertise as it builds a strong and diverse financial service industry, which it needs to manage its looming demographic crisis. A rapidly aging population and shrinking workforce have increased the burden on the country's inadequate pension system, and put tremendous pressure on the government to provide enough financial resources for the elderly.
China's strict adherence to its "zero Covid" strategy and slow, self-isolation from much of the world hasn't been enough to throw the country off course, either. Last year, Fang Xinghai, vice chairman of the China Securities Regulatory Commission, repeatedly talked about the importance of opening up the financial service industry and drawing on global capital and financial expertise.
"One of the Chinese Communist Party's key attributes has been its adaptability and its pragmatism," Singleton said.
He added that China understands it needs to maintain access to foreign markets, technology and capital, necessitating those continued partnerships with Western firms.
"In other words, the CCP must integrate to survive, which means that it cannot completely eschew existing global norms or systems even as it tries to alter them to suit Beijing's needs," Singleton said.
CNN · by Analysis by Laura He, CNN Business
20. Analysis | Lithuania is learning the cost of standing up to China. Without E.U. backing, it may be forced to sit back down.
It is going to take a village to stand up to China.
Analysis | Lithuania is learning the cost of standing up to China. Without E.U. backing, it may be forced to sit back down.
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Don’t mess with the Middle Kingdom.
That’s the message China is sending Lithuania, a tiny Baltic country of 2.8 million. Beijing unleashed withering penalties — including a de facto trade embargo and a downgrading of diplomatic relations — following Vilnius’s move to allow Taiwan to open a contentiously named representative office in Lithuania. A vocal critic of Beijing’s human rights record, Lithuania also announced in December that it would not send a government delegation to the Beijing Winter Games, in concert with a U.S. diplomatic boycott.
Lithuania’s Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis spoke with me Thursday, ahead of a critical meeting on the crisis with his European Union peers on Friday, and amid signs that Chinese pressure is working.
As the costs mount for Lithuania — China has gone so far as to threaten companies that do business in the country and clamp down on European goods with Lithuanian parts — a new poll suggests only 13 percent of the public supports their government’s China policy. The Foreign Ministry is now clarifying that it never officially declared a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Games. Most significantly, Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda on Jan. 4 called it a “mistake” to let Taiwan open a local office under its own name — as opposed to using “Chinese Taipei,” a title often used elsewhere to avoid the perception of challenging China’s claim to Taiwan.
So, is Lithuania backing down? Landsbergis suggested the answer will depend on whether the European Union stands with his country against Chinese tactics he likened to the “Spanish Inquisition.”
This conversation with Landsbergis has been edited for length and clarity.
China denies that it has launched a punishing trade embargo against Lithuania. What actually happened?
Our companies could no longer find Lithuania as a clearance option in Chinese customs. As a country, we were just removed as an option. That was probably the most aggressive piece of evidence. But there are a number of others, and we are now presenting all the documents we have gathered to the European Commission’s trade department, and they will be assessing it from a legal standpoint.
President Nauseda recently called the decision to allow Taiwan to open an office in Vilnius under its own name “a mistake.” Is Lithuania rolling back that decision?
I don’t want to comment on the president’s statement. [But] I don’t think that it was a mistake. The government doesn’t think that it was a mistake to allow the people from Taiwan island to call themselves Taiwanese. We are very clearly stating that it has not breached the one-China policy. … So what we are calling a mistake is China’s reaction — what our companies, European companies, are now facing. The mistake is [the Chinese government’s decision to] unilaterally rename Lithuania’s Embassy in Beijing. This is a mistake, and somebody might even say that this is a breach of international regulations.
What did the Chinese change the name to?
I think that they’re calling it something like an office of chargé d’affaires. We don’t even have the possibility of calling our offices that in our legislation. They changed the name, they revoked our IDs, and that’s why we had to evacuate our staff [from Lithuania’s Embassy in Beijing.]
In December, Nauseda announced that neither he nor any other government minister would attend the Beijing Winter Games, a move seen as tantamount to the diplomatic boycott declared by the Biden administration. But the Foreign Ministry has clarified that Lithuania is not staging such a boycott. Can you explain?
What we’ve consistently said is that there was no official decision to call it a boycott. On the other hand, no official is going to attend and no diplomatic staff is going to attend. But when we were asked, could you call it a diplomatic boycott, I was always explaining there was no official decision by the government or Parliament to call it that.
Was that clarification influenced by pressure from China?
No.
What do you make of the new poll indicating only 13 percent of Lithuanians back the government’s hard stance on China?
A poll is a poll. It’s official news. I’m not completely happy with how the question was phrased. But what I can say, as a politician, is this: Obviously the pressure from China on our companies is definitely putting a strain on building a broad consensus on the subject.
What has China’s actions cost Lithuanian companies so far?
We’re talking in the millions. In the tens of millions. What we’re doing is trying to help the companies get their cargo out [of China]. It’s a lot of strain on the government as well. The biggest problem is that China has escalated, targeting European companies, targeting German companies. This is why we believe that it’s no longer just a bilateral issue. It’s a European one. And there has to be a European solution.
Have the Chinese done this in the hopes that the E.U. will pressure Lithuania to back down?
That is one of the possible explanations.
Is that tactic going to work?
It very much depends on the European answer. There is a possibility that Europe, that European companies, the big multinational companies, will pressure Lithuania. It’s now a question of whether the European Union can withstand the pressure because obviously it’s not that hard to put a lot of pressure on Lithuania and expect it to break. Because there’s only so much pressure we can take. But if we stand in solidarity, if we give a very clear response that such coercion is not just against one country in the union that China tends not to like, but it’s more an incursion on the single market, than we send a signal that this is against European rules.
Surely Lithuania knew China would respond forcefully to allowing Taiwan — which Beijing claims as part of China — to open a representative office under its own name, as opposed to using Chinese Taipei, a title other countries often use to get around this question.
We stand by the belief that people can have a name for their representative office of their liking if it’s agreed between the two sides and if it’s not infringing on any international obligations. So we stand by it. But the escalation level that China decided to choose is beyond anything that’s happened before against any other country in the world. This is like the Spanish Inquisition, which nobody had expected.
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21. U.S. veterans urge Biden admin not to release frozen funds to Iran
U.S. veterans urge Biden admin not to release frozen funds to Iran
The U.S. this month agreed to allow Iran access to some funds frozen in South Korea.
U.S. military veterans and their families on Thursday called on the Biden administration not to release frozen funds to Iran as part of nuclear negotiations until American victims of terrorist attacks carried out by the Tehran regime or its proxies are compensated.
More than 1,000 veterans and family members of those killed or wounded in bombings and other attacks in Iraq and elsewhere issued the appeal in a letter to President Joe Biden, asking that he meet with some of the families whose loved ones were killed.
“We share your view that Iran must never be allowed to develop or acquire nuclear weapons, but we do not believe that any sanctions on Iran should be lifted or suspended that result in the release of frozen funds until all outstanding judgments and pending claims against Iran and the IRGC (Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps) have been fully satisfied,” said the letter obtained by NBC News.
“In our view, Iran’s frozen funds should go first to the regime’s American victims before a single dollar goes to the regime itself,” it said.
The letter said there is an estimated $60 billion in unpaid terrorism lawsuit judgments and associated liens as a result of U.S. court cases against Iran, with billions more tied up in pending claims.
U.S. officials previously have said hundreds of American troops were killed by Iranian-backed militia in the Iraq war. Iran has denied any role in the attacks.
The appeal from the families comes as the U.S. and European powers reported modest progress in talks in Vienna with Iran over reviving the 2015 nuclear deal designed to prevent Tehran from building nuclear weapons.
Throughout the talks, Iran has demanded the U.S. unblock billions of dollars in funds around the world that have been frozen by U.S. sanctions.
The 2015 nuclear agreement between Iran and world powers eased sanctions on Tehran in return for strict limits on its nuclear program, including restrictions on uranium enrichment and the use of advanced centrifuges. When the deal was signed, the U.S. unblocked some Iranian assets.
President Donald Trump pulled the U.S. out of the accord in 2018 and reimposed economic sanctions on Iran and added new measures. As a result of the reimposed sanctions, Iran cannot gain access to assets abroad, including revenue from some oil sales and other transactions.
Earlier this month, the Treasury Department said it would allow South Korea to send at least $63 million in overdue damages to an Iranian company. The money had been blocked by U.S. sanctions and Iran has been seeking access to billions of dollars frozen in South Korea and in other countries.
The move followed talks between South Korea’s Deputy Foreign Minister Choi Jong-kun and the U.S. special envoy for Iran, Robert Malley. Iran says the U.S. has blocked about $7 billion in South Korea related to oil shipments.
Since the U.S. left the deal, Iran has violated the deal’s limits on its nuclear activities and hampered access for U.N. nuclear inspectors.
Biden administration officials say time is running out to reach an agreement to rescue the 2015 nuclear deal.
22. Will Biden’s Conventional Arms Transfer policy be an evolution or a revolution?
Will Biden’s Conventional Arms Transfer policy be an evolution or a revolution? - Breaking Defense
Sales of US made weapons abroad could be impacted from the Biden administration’s new CAT policy. (DVIDS)
In the coming weeks, the Biden administration is expected to release its newest version of the Conventional Arms Transfer (CAT) policy, which will serve as a clear sign on how the administration will differentiate itself from the Trump administration on arms sales issues. In this op ed Josh Kirshner of Beacon Global Strategies lays out a history of the CAT policy and offers some predictions on how it could change.
The Biden administration is expected to soon release its version of the US Conventional Arms Transfer (CAT) policy, which sets the guardrails for how America sells arms to foreign militaries. While the administration has held its cards close on what the new policy will entail, it is widely expected to put a renewed emphasis on the human rights records of potential arms buyers.
This is not only because the President has been committed to promoting human rights throughout his career, including by convening the first-ever Summit for Democracy in December, but also so he can make clear that his commitment to human rights differs from the Trump administration’s, which largely overlooked such concerns.
The question is, will the Biden CAT policy be revolutionary, or like most presidents’ arms sales policies, evolutionary?
Reflecting the concerns of the immediate post-Vietnam War period, President Jimmy Carter followed through on a campaign promise by publishing Presidential Directive/NSC-13 [PDF] and a “policy statement” on conventional arms transfers – the first from a US president. Carter made clear his intent: “The United States can and should take the first step” in order to reduce the supply of arms globally. He drew a direct link to human rights, stating that US security assistance programs “will promote and advance respect for human rights in recipient countries.”
Not surprisingly, President Ronald Reagan took a very different tact, and his presidential directive on CAT allowed for significantly more defense exports. Of the five CAT policies after Carter, this is the only truly revolutionary one.
Reagan boldly refuted Carter’s rhetoric, stating that the US “will deal with the world as it is, rather than as we would like it to be” and proclaimed that arms transfers would not be “discrete,” but instead an “essential” and “indispensable” part of the United States’ effort to strengthen its national security and defend the free world. Reagan’s revolutionary policy introduced the concept of a “case-by-case” review of sales, giving the government the flexibility to ignore its own CAT policy if it sees fit.
Just weeks after releasing this policy, Reagan approved the world’s then-largest arms sale, a $8.5 billion package to Saudi Arabia that included AWACS surveillance aircraft. The sale was controversial on the Hill, with 44 senators — including then-Senator Joseph Biden — cosponsoring a bill to block the sale.
Fourteen years later, after the end of the Cold War in 1995, President Bill Clinton released the nation’s next CAT policy, which in true Clintonian fashion triangulated between the Carter and Reagan policies.
While his policy echoed elements of Carter’s intent of restraint, Clinton emphasized Reagan’s case-by-case concept by including it in the very first sentence of his criteria, and then reinforced the Republican president’s philosophy by stating that “transfers of conventional arms [are] a legitimate instrument of US foreign policy,” and reaffirmed the link between the health of the defense industrial base and the overall economy.
In practice, Clinton approved several significant arms sales, including $500 million in fighter aircraft to Chile. This reversal of Carter’s refusal to sell advanced weaponry to Latin America resulted in Senate legislation to show liberal opposition to the shift. One of the co-sponsors? Senator Joseph Biden.
President Obama’s CAT policy was the first of the post 9/11 era, more focused on defense exports as a tool to build partner capabilities to fight terrorism, restating Reagan’s mantra that arms transfers are a “legitimate instrument” of national security policy.
While the Obama policy discusses human rights in more detail than previous versions, stating a need for “restraint against the transfer of arms that would… serve to facilitate human rights abuses…,” it does not state that the US should leverage defense export decisions to push recipients to improve their human rights. The human rights community would like to see Biden’s policy clearly state that it will take such an approach.
For all of the differences between Presidents Obama and Trump, and despite the commentary that President Trump’s CAT policy was radically pro-industry, the text of his policy was in truth evolutionary, continuing many elements of the Obama-era policy and actually copying some language verbatim.
Where Trump differed from Obama significantly was in his implementation of the policy, specifically with his White House’s willingness to work directly with defense companies, instead of directing them to State or Defense. Senior White House staff also made the case to push defense exports publicly, making them a key part of Trump’s economic agenda. In this COVID era, how closely Biden ties defense exports to job creation and improving the manufacturing sector is an area to watch.
What Might Biden’s CAT Policy Look Like?
A CAT policy centrally focused on human rights would be revolutionary, recalling the views of the senator from Delaware who consistently pushed back against presidents as they attempted to sell arms abroad in the 1980s and 1990s. However, there are several reasons to believe that Biden will instead favor an evolutionary CAT policy.
First, Biden has made repairing frayed international partnerships and countering China core foreign policy tenets. Increased defense cooperation with partners, including arms sales, is one way to show the US commitment to rebuilding these relationships.
Second, as part of his effort to repair a US economy ravaged by COVID-19, the president has specifically targeted assistance to the manufacturing sector. The aerospace and defense industry supports over 2.5 million domestic jobs [PDF], including highly skilled manufacturing, creating a significant economic incentive for the White House to enable this industry to grow.
Third, he served as Obama’s vice president, and both National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and Secretary of State Tony Blinken served in prominent roles during the Obama administration. They had a hand in crafting and implementing Obama’s CAT policy; it is unlikely their views on arms sales have changed dramatically over the past four years.
Other changes we may see in Biden’s CAT policy include an increased focus on protecting US-origin military technology from Chinese intellectual property theft, further developing the US position on exporting surveillance technology (as discussed at the Summit for Democracy), and more detail on how the government will consider the export of cyber technologies to foreign militaries.
The rhetoric of Biden’s CAT policy will likely make clear that the Trump era of defense exports is over, and human rights will be a more significant criteria. Indeed, sales went down 21% in fiscal year 2021, which spanned the last three months of the Trump administration and the first nine months of Biden’s. But ultimately, the practical result of the policy will come down to implementation, as Biden and his team grapple with how to balance his commitment to human rights with a rapidly evolving landscape of domestic and international challenges.
Josh Kirshner previously served as special assistant to the Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security and as a professional staff member on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. He is currently a senior vice president at Beacon Global Strategies.
23. Nathan Law’s Lesson for Democracies
Conclusion:
Law’s solution—more activism and civic engagement—is not new, and he acknowledges these options may feel futile against growing authoritarianism. But he continues the fight. Freedom: How We Lose It and How We Fight Back is a compelling read and an earnest reminder that those who live in democracies must remain active citizens to safeguard their own freedoms. Law has experienced the heartache of witnessing freedom disappear from his homeland and has paid the price of permanent exile, committing to full-time political activism. Perhaps in the future, he will write a memoir; his story is not yet finished.
Nathan Law’s Lesson for Democracies
The exiled Hong Kong activist makes a case for fighting global authoritarianism in a new book.
By Melissa Chan, a reporter focused on transnational issues.
Flowers and photographs of the “Goddess of Democracy” statue lay on the ground at the Chinese University of Hong Kong after authorities removed the statue in Hong Kong on Dec. 24, 2021. Anthony Kwan/Getty Images
“What does it mean to be free in a world increasingly shaped by the rising authoritarian power of the People’s Republic of China?” Hong Kong activist Nathan Law asks in his new book, written from exile in the United Kingdom. He finds his answer in the essential features of a democratic society: the right to protest, the rule of law, a free press. But Law’s most significant personal act of political freedom may be the publication of the book itself.
In September 2016, at 23 years old, Law became Hong Kong’s youngest elected legislator, winning 50,818 votes before his court-ordered disqualification (on the specious charge he had failed to sincerely take his oath of office). That is 50,818 more votes than Chinese President Xi Jinping has ever won in a free and fair election, and Law’s voice—legitimate and representative—makes him a threat to the regime, along with other prominent activists in the last decade’s youth protests. Beijing has campaigned to wreck Law’s character, labeling him a fugitive after his departure to avoid imminent arrest under the draconian 2020 national security law to destroy any attempt to fight for Hong Kongers’ rights inside or out of the system.
Freedom: How We Lose It and How We Fight Back, published with co-author Evan Fowler, is not a memoir. Law has instead produced a treatise on democracy interspersed with his autobiography. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) aggressively seeks to rewrite Hong Kong’s history, painting the 2019 and 2020 protests that once brought around 20 percent of residents to the streets as the work of foreign operators and terrorists. Law’s book serves as a record of what his generation stood for—and what has happened to the people of Hong Kong—no matter which substitute version of history Beijing promulgates.
“What does it mean to be free in a world increasingly shaped by the rising authoritarian power of the People’s Republic of China?” Hong Kong activist Nathan Law asks in his new book, written from exile in the United Kingdom. He finds his answer in the essential features of a democratic society: the right to protest, the rule of law, a free press. But Law’s most significant personal act of political freedom may be the publication of the book itself.
In September 2016, at 23 years old, Law became Hong Kong’s youngest elected legislator, winning 50,818 votes before his court-ordered disqualification (on the specious charge he had failed to sincerely take his oath of office). That is 50,818 more votes than Chinese President Xi Jinping has ever won in a free and fair election, and Law’s voice—legitimate and representative—makes him a threat to the regime, along with other prominent activists in the last decade’s youth protests. Beijing has campaigned to wreck Law’s character, labeling him a fugitive after his departure to avoid imminent arrest under the draconian 2020 national security law to destroy any attempt to fight for Hong Kongers’ rights inside or out of the system.
Freedom: How We Lose It and How We Fight Back, Nathan Law with Evan Fowler, The Experiment, 240 pp., $15.95, December 2021
Freedom: How We Lose It and How We Fight Back, published with co-author Evan Fowler, is not a memoir. Law has instead produced a treatise on democracy interspersed with his autobiography. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) aggressively seeks to rewrite Hong Kong’s history, painting the 2019 and 2020 protests that once brought around 20 percent of residents to the streets as the work of foreign operators and terrorists. Law’s book serves as a record of what his generation stood for—and what has happened to the people of Hong Kong—no matter which substitute version of history Beijing promulgates.
Law never intended to stand on the front lines of a global ideological battle. His Instagram profile, which features him cheerfully holding his two cats, hints at the worry-free life he might have led in anonymity. Born in mainland China, Law describes his working-class family’s move to Hong Kong as an economic migration and his childhood as largely absent of politics. His transformation took place while attending university, as he and his classmates observed the tightening political climate. “No one chooses to become a dissident. To dissent is a reaction,” he writes.
Like so many other Hong Kongers, Law’s awakening came with the slow crumbling of the Sino-British Joint Declaration, the agreement that handed the colony back to China in 1997 with a guarantee it would preserve Hong Kong’s freedoms. In hindsight, the idea the “one country, two systems” principle could succeed may have been magical thinking. Even if China showed some willingness to stick to it in the early years, its end was inevitable—especially as Hong Kong became less economically important to the mainland. For an absolutist like Xi, there is no such thing as two systems: He understands he faces little punitive cost for disregarding a document signed with a post-imperial middle power.
Law describes the steady creep of Chinese authoritarianism, from official attempts to roll out so-called patriotic education in schools to the kidnapping of five local booksellers who sold material critical of the Chinese government in 2015. His own story—along with those of friends who are either in prison, in exile, or silent—shows how rapidly Hong Kong has descended in a few short years. Civil society organizations have disbanded. Journalists have lost their jobs, from the staff of the now-defunct pro-democratic Apple Daily to those who left after the takeover of public broadcaster Radio Television Hong Kong by Beijing loyalists. Social media accounts have gone quiet as Hong Kongers erase evidence of their participation in or sympathy for the protests.
What troubles Law most is how autocrats turn the features of liberal societies toward oppression—not just in Hong Kong but in struggling democracies from Brazil to Hungary. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has worked to undermine his country’s institutions, from the courts to election authorities, all in the name of Brazil’s people. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has done the same at home while effectively wielding his country’s European Union membership to veto action against China.
But if the autocrats have started working together, so too must the dissidents. Law calls for more cross-border collaboration, such as Southeast Asia’s Milk Tea Alliance activist network. The alliance grew out of an online meme but quickly became a serious term of solidarity and a hashtag used to disseminate critical information. Beginning in 2020, it gathered momentum during the military crackdown on anti-coup protesters in Myanmar.
Law argues the stakes of defending democracy are as existential as the fight against climate change. Authoritarianism is “polluting the world’s politics,” he writes. Just as young people have energized the environmental movement, Law hopes his generation is ready for the fight against tyranny. In Hong Kong and elsewhere, those in power have cast youth activists as naive and misguided. Beijing has pushed this type of propaganda for decades, and in the absence of competing narratives, many people in China have bought the CCP’s story.
But Law says young people make ideal activists. “We don’t yet have many of the responsibilities of later life, and we are also less deeply embedded in existing political power structures,” he writes. “Our relative innocence to the way things are, and to the realities of the world, fosters a refreshing idealism and the imagination to do things differently. We see this in young people everywhere.” He reminds readers that every generation must fight for and earn its freedom and democracy.
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Sixty years ago, a barrier in Berlin transformed Europe overnight. Today, authoritarian regimes are following in East Germany’s footsteps by barring their citizens from leaving.
Law makes a case for how Beijing’s authoritarianism and economic leverage play out in some democracies. China has slapped import bans on various Australian goods following its call for an investigation into COVID-19’s origins. Lithuania, increasingly friendly with Taiwan, faces the prospect that its fellow European Union member states will be blocked from the Chinese market if it continues business operations in the country. And, as Law experiences when he encounters hecklers abroad, there are those who “choose simply not to believe the overwhelming evidence of what is reported in the free press and to align themselves with the CCP narrative.”
This authoritarian expansion into democratic arenas may prove to be the biggest challenge. Beijing used a bludgeon to bring Hong Kong into submission, but it cannot employ the same tactics abroad, so-called wolf warrior diplomacy notwithstanding. Instead, China has flexed its economic might to achieve its goals and demanded fealty from its citizens living overseas. It has also spurred disinformation campaigns, twisting the language of liberalism into a weapon. Its propaganda news outlets, from China Daily to China Global Television Network, spread lies in the name of freedom of expression.
Law’s solution—more activism and civic engagement—is not new, and he acknowledges these options may feel futile against growing authoritarianism. But he continues the fight. Freedom: How We Lose It and How We Fight Back is a compelling read and an earnest reminder that those who live in democracies must remain active citizens to safeguard their own freedoms. Law has experienced the heartache of witnessing freedom disappear from his homeland and has paid the price of permanent exile, committing to full-time political activism. Perhaps in the future, he will write a memoir; his story is not yet finished.
Melissa Chan is a reporter focused on transnational issues. She covers China’s influence beyond its borders and the rise of global authoritarianism. She is a contributor to the Global Reporting Centre in Vancouver, Canada. Twitter: @melissakchan
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David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
